====== Panspermia theory ======

The //Panspermia// theory - the roots of which go back at least as far as the 5th century BCE - was popularized in the 1980s by Fred ([[content:physics:cosmology:big_bang|'Big Bang']]) Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasingh.

The idea is that the building-blocks of life (e.g. DNA/RNA fragments, or Amino Acid protein-components) may exist and travel through deep space. Thus, such compounds may have arrived on Earth as 'space dust', or by comet impact, and could have provided triggers for the [[content:life_sciences:life_itself:primordial_soup|origin of Life]] on the planet.

Since the 1980s, many discoveries have been made which make the Panspermia theory appear less improbable.

For example :

  * Amino acids have now been confirmed in deep space.([[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/R-Boyd|example ref.]])
  * It's now known that some viruses and bacteria //can// survive in space ([[https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mmbr.00016-09|ref.]])
  * U//racil// - one of the base-pair compounds of RNA - had been found in a meteorite ([[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36904-3|ref.]]).

Although there is now a growing body of evidence appearing to support the theory - or at least not contradict it - it's still not widely accepted by experts in the field.

Further reading [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065266020300249|Advances in Genetics, Volume 106, pp.101-107]]

**Note :** // Wikipedia // maintains [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules|a list]] of chemical compounds, including amino acids, which have been detected in Space.