Good day
I have a question.
Do you have evidence against panspermia? I feel concern about it.
That’s a bit like asking for evidence against the existence of aliens on some other planet in a far away galaxy. Panspermia is too speculative and hypothetical to really have evidence against it.
On a side note, geologists have recovered meteors on Earth that were once part of Mars. A massive collision on Mars threw up chunks of Mars’ crust, and some of it landed on Earth. It is possible, however improbable, that some bacteria could have hitched a ride from Mars to Earth on those meteors. I’m not aware of any evidence that would completely disprove this possibility.
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I’d never heard of panspermia before. So, thank you for the opportunity to learn something new.
Why are you concerned about it? What are your concerns?
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I’ve never been interested since that just kicks the question down the road. Where did that life from beyond earth come from? And if there is a still early progenitor, where did that life come from, and so. So no real answer in that. At some point life needs to have arisen from non life, either by abiogenesis or some cosmic watchmaker.
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the theory that life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores that develop in the right environment.
It concern me because it feels like life is accidental, meaningless and without purpose and thats my main concern about that theory.
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Mostly, panspermia just isn’t helpful. We have no evidence that life exists anywhere else. And to suggest it came from somewhere else is to throw away all the evidence we have right here on the planet where we know life really does exist. The earth is where we need to look for evidence in figuring out how it started.
When an illness presents in someone, how much sense does it make to suggest it came from someone else when nobody else has the symptoms. It only makes sense to look for the cause in the patient which really has the illness until it shows up in someone else.
The other direction seems more likely (given Chicxulub, for instance) and that bacterial remains from Earth will have been blasted into the solar system in detritus from impact events here.
Why would it seem meaningless? Or purposeless?
Would you feel meaningless or purposeless, if it were true?
I did found this, Do you guys understand what he says?
I think, I would feel meaningless and purpoless if the theory was true because I would feel that life was an accident.
Do you feel that the only source of purpose and meaning in any human life is external?
Independent of the source of life on Earth, do you feel your life is or could be without meaning or purpose?
Looking at external sources of meaning and purpose, are their people in your life to whom you ascribe meaning and purpose?
I’m not arguing one thing or another regarding panspermia, but I think the value of life and its ultimate meaning and purpose are not entirely dependent on a particular type of source of all living.
While I am a Christian, I also recognize that humanity has enormous power to recognize and even ascribe meaning and purpose to all sorts of things and beings in our lives, particularly within our small social circles, for example within familes.
Casting even farther, we understand that intelligent animals such as elephants mourn the death of family and herd members. This seems a lot like meaning, if not purpose.
If panspermia were a demonstrable fact, I see no reason to worry about it. At all. Attend to the people and things that are meaningful to you. Build and maintain meaningful relationships. Be alive within those webs of relationships. Serve others. Receive gratefully the love and service of others to you.
If you are a Christian, revel in the wonder of your glorious savior. Worship him with joy and reverance. Participate in the Body of Christ.
Drop the assumption that life had to start in some particular way to have value, meaning or purpose. It’s not a useful or helpful lens.
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From a theological point the beginning of life is a stupid proposal es we believe life to be eternal. Otherwise you are left with a dead God that would need to be born.
Life is the ability to move energy by will. In the simplest of material life forms this will is encoded as a self replication mechanism. Having found access to the coding system we are now trying ourselves to use that system to achieve our own means as to impose our own will on nature which looks like it will be trouble.
However it appears that the system is self attenuating as it has an inbuilt feedback loop called survival fitness meaning that the failure to be supportive of the system, e.g. selfishness, leads to automatic removal from the system - e.g. genepool. Whilst some still follow the primitive understanding that survival fitness is the ability to feed and f*** fastest and be the top preditor some people wake up to the fact that altruism is the most important feature for system stability. As such evolution is a prime example of being controled by the word of God as in the ability to love our neighbours like our own. the problem still is for most people to see what qualifies our neighbour. For some that still ends by skin colour, or age and ability, whilst some even recognise it to breach the species barrier and they even love the humble bees, knowing how worthy of our love they are.
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Panspermia has no credibility at all over interplanetary let alone interstellar distances. Incalcuably many sigmas. Nonetheless meaningless nature is powerful enough to create life locally. Because here it is. As for meaning, I’m watching Paul McCartney at Glastonbury, a week later, that’ll do just fine.
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I’ve always found nature to be plenty super and, if I were a OEC, I’d add that that is why God has used it.
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