PANSPERMIA
It requires desperation to come up with the things the evolutionists invent. They cannot figure out how life could have originated on earth; so now they say the living creatures braved lethal cold and heat and deadly ultraviolet radiation—and flew in from outer space! This is science vs. evolution—a Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia, brought to you by Creation Science Facts.
CONTENTS: Panspermia
Crick's Rocket Sperms: An alien race sent them here on rockets
Hoyle's Comet Creatures: They lived on comets, before settling here
Hoyle's Light Beam Riders: These little fellows sat astride light beams from the stars
Arrhenius' Migratory Spores: Colonizers traveling throughout the universe
Asimov Blasts Them Out of Space: With a little something called ultraviolet
Conclusion: The ideas are fantastic and actually explain so little
This material is excerpted from the book, HISTORY OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY. An asterisk ( * ) by a name indicates that person is not known to be a creationist. Of over 4,000 quotations in the books this Encyclopedia is based on, only 164 statements are by creationists.
Panspermia (also called "directed panspermia") is the teaching that life on earth originated from "life sperms," or spores, that arrived from outer space. Here are a few statements on the matter that will reveal, first, the fantastic notions involved in this theory and, second, the utter impossibility of it occurring:
CRICK'S ROCKET SPERMS
*Francis Crick received the Noble Prize for his discovery of the DNA molecule. In his 1981 book, Life Itself, he fills the first half of the book with reasons why life could not originate on our planet—and then he proceeds to suggest that it came from outer space on rockets!
"Crick . . proposed that life began somewhere else in the universe and evolved to a much higher technical level than is now present on earth. He next suggests these life forms are now sending rockets containing primitive life forms (perhaps bacteria or blue-green algae) throughout the universe, spreading the seeds of life hither and yonder. Crick even describes the rocket's design and postulates the conditions necessary for successful re-entry into our atmosphere."—Richard Tkachuck, book review, in Origins, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1983, p. 91.
"In Life Itself, a noted coauthor of the Watson-Crick model for DNA structure embraces an origins view called "Directed Panspermia," in which it is assumed that life was originally sent to earth from outer space! According to Crick, life evolved from nonlife on some other planet, starting with the spontaneous generation of bacteria and proceeding all the way to highly intelligent beings. These gifted individuals (about whom Crick says surprisingly little in the book) then sent our own bacterial ancestors here on an unmanned spacecraft.
"This means that Crick believes life has evolved twice—once from molecules to intelligent people somewhere else, and then again from bacteria to man on earth! He also holds that all this took place in about 9 billion years following a Big Bang."—George F. Howe, book review, in Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1983, p. 190.
Since the Big Bang supposedly occurred 10 billion years ago (others say 15 billion), the rocket with the bacteria is supposed to have arrived here 6 billion years ago. It is wonderful how scientific an idea appears when you date it! But let us add a few more time spans: This rocket, traveling at a speed of 18,000 m.p.h., would take 5 months to travel to the sun and 115,000 years to reach the nearest star. How long would living creatures survive on such a trip? Their food, water, and air would be exhausted long before they reached their destination. The rocket ship would become a crematorium.
HOYLE'S COMET CREATURES
*Fred Hoyle, the originator of the steady state universe theory (which he later abandoned), after spending several years writing science fiction books, wrote a book with *N. Chandra Wickramasinghe in 1979, called Lifecloud: the Origin of Life in the Universe. In the book they first list solid evidence why it would be impossible for life to begin here on earth, and then they present their theory that life originated in living creatures feeding, breeding, and multiplying—in comets,—which managed to arrive here! Science fiction writers make good evolutionary theorists. In fact, you can hardly tell the two apart when you pick up their books.
"Recently, he [Hoyle] has come up with a theory on the origin of life which says that life on earth was seeded by colliding comets . . In a book review of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's book, Lifecloud: the Origin of the Universe, Colin Pillinger accuses the authors of selecting their evidence and elevating speculation to fact. Fred Whipple states what is likely the consensus of opinion on Hoyle's theory:
"I am charmed but not impressed by the picture of life forms developing in warm little ponds, protected in their icy igloos from the cruel cold and near vacuum of open space, and falling to primitive Earth at speeds exceeding eleven Kilometers per second' [Fred L. Whipple, "Origin of the Solar System" (Review of Hoyle's work), in Nature 278(577:819).]"—Michael J. Oard, book review, in Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1982, p. 69.
For a time, *Hoyle and *Wickramasinghe held to this comet origin of life seeds. Their view was that, since it is impossible for life to form on earth,—it must have formed in the tails of comets and gas clouds in the sky! The near absolute zero temperatures (hundreds of degrees below the "zero" on our thermometers) in hydrogen clouds might, it was theorized, provide better conditions for the formation of life than sand, seawater, and lightning bolts on earth.
"Very small quantities of microscopic bits of life may be formed, they feel—not enough to be detected at astronomical distances, but large in an absolute sense; and these may be formed not only in distant gas clouds but in comets of our own solar system. Life on Earth may therefore have originated when spores were carried to Earth by comet tails. (It is only fair to say that almost no one takes this speculation seriously.)"—*Issac Asimov, Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984), p. 640.
HOYLE'S LIGHT BEAM RIDERS
Another theory of Hoyle's was developed two years later: life forms continually reach the earth directly from outer space. How do they get here? They ride light beams! As fast as one theory is shot down, another pops up. *Hoyle and *Wickramasinghe explained the light-beam theory in their 1981 book, Evolution from Space. Howe discusses their conjectures:
"Like their counterpart in life science, Dr. F.C. Crick of DNA fame, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe seriously suggest that packets of genetic material continually enter our atmosphere from outer space, riding the pressure of light between stars. These may be mere specks of genetic code stuff (in their view), entire bacteria, or even insect eggs. Some source out there, they believe, is benevolently broadcasting these materials widely and is thus providing predesigned systems that any forms of life may need to adapt for whatever environmental niches they may be encountering on particular planets. Where successes occur, they envision whole new blocks of genes entering the cell and producing new functions on the order of the way a computer can be rapidly `upgraded' . .
"Like the Darwinism that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's model is supposed to replace, cosmic evolution suffers at precisely the same points: lack of any adequate mechanism and absence of experimental supporting data. They are obviously unable to show the reader strong evidence of such genetic packages in astronomical debris entering our atmosphere. It seems this (and this alone) is the key evidence required to put this interesting origins model on some sort of scientific basis . . [After reading the book] I am led to conclude that their real evidence for the entry of microbes from space is approximately zero, despite all that they propose by way of supporting comment and background discussion."—George F. Howe, book review, in Creation Research Society Quarterly, December 1982, pp. 192-193.
ARRHENIUS' MIGRATORY SPORES
It all started with *Arrhenius, a chemist who in 1907 published a book on the subject.
"Toward the end of the nineteenth century some theorists went to the other extreme and made life eternal. The most popular theory was advanced by Svante Arrhenius (the chemist who had developed the concept of ionization). In 1907, he published a book, entitled Worlds in the Making, picturing a universe in which life had always existed and migrated across space, continually colonizing new planets. Life traveled in the form of spores that escaped from the atmosphere of a planet by random movement and then were driven through space by the pressure of light from the sun."—*Issac Asimov, Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984), p. 638.
ASIMOV BLASTS THEM OUT OF SPACE
*Asimov then demolishes that fantastic theory in one bold stroke:
"At first blush, this theory looks attractive . . But Arrhenius' suggestion fell before the onslaught of ultraviolet light. In 1910, experimenters showed that ultraviolet light quickly kills bacterial spores; and, in interplanetary space, the sun's ultraviolet light is intense—not to speak of other destructive radiations, such as cosmic rays, solar X rays, and zones of charged particles like the Van Allen Belts around the earth. Conceivably, there may be spores somewhere that are resistant to radiation, but spores made of protein and nucleic acid, as we know them, could not make the grade."—*Ibid.
Asimov then goes on to explain that the longest that bacteria have been able to survive in the "harsh unfiltered sunlight" of outer space is 6 hours. So "life spores" hopping rides on "light beams" to distant planets—would survive less than one-fourth of a day in outer space.
CONCLUSION
At the heart of it, all these life-spores-from-out-of-space theories are based on the impossibility of life forming by chance on earth. Men have recognized and accepted the fact, and then tried to bring the life from somewhere else. All they are doing is pushing the problem back a notch, but they are not solving it.
"Life spore" theories try to solve the problem of how life originated. But they do not do this, for they only tell us that life originated somewhere else—and how did it originate there?
In addition, they accomplish nothing toward explaining how life evolved! The utterly complex, networking of the DNA code, the complications of protein, enzymes, and other structures and activities within each species,—all unite in producing an impassable barrier in the path of trans-species changes.
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WISTAR DESTROYS EVOLUTION: A special major meeting of scientists which concluded, on the basis of new evidence, that evolutionary theory was dead.