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In this way, panspermia studies concentrate not on how life began but on methods that may distribute it within the Universe. [10] [11] [12] This point is often used as a criticism of the theory. Panspermia is a fringe theory with little support amongst mainstream scientists. [13]
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Traditional religion attributed the origin of life to deities who created the natural world. Spontaneous generation, the first naturalistic theory of abiogenesis, goes back to Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy, and continued to have support in Western scholarship until the 19th century. [15]
Paul Martin at Rampart Cave, home of the Shasta ground sloth in Grand Canyon, ca. 1975. Paul Schultz Martin (born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1928, died in Tucson, Arizona September 13, 2010) [1] [2] was an American geoscientist at the University of Arizona who developed the theory that the Pleistocene extinction of large mammals worldwide was caused by overhunting by humans. [3]
Dating back to Anaxagoras in the 5th century BC, panspermia [29] is the idea that life originated elsewhere in the universe and came to Earth. The modern version of panspermia holds that life may have been distributed to Earth by meteoroids, asteroids, comets [30] or planetoids. [31]
Directed panspermia is a type of panspermia that implies the deliberate transport of microorganisms into space to be used as introduced species on other astronomical objects. Historically, Shklovskii and Sagan (1966) and Crick and Orgel (1973) hypothesized that life on the Earth may have been seeded deliberately by other civilizations.
Pseudo-panspermia (sometimes called soft panspermia, molecular panspermia or quasi-panspermia) is a well-supported hypothesis for a stage in the origin of life. The theory first asserts that many of the small organic molecules used for life originated in space (for example, being incorporated in the solar nebula , from which the planets condensed).
The theory tried to explain how the universe could be eternal and essentially unchanging while still having the galaxies we observe moving away from each other. The theory hinged on the creation of matter between galaxies over time, so that even though galaxies get further apart, new ones that develop between them fill the space they leave.
Thomas Gold [3] (May 22, 1920 – June 22, 2004 [4]) was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, who also held British and American citizenship.He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). [4]