Roy writes:

> <[log in to unmask]> writes
> >Actually, the idea of life from space was one of Fred Hoyle's suggestions.
> >A reformed atheist.
>  
> The Panspermia hypothesis. It may be right or it may be wrong, but as 
> far as the fundamentals go - how life originated and so on - all it does 
> is move the goalposts back a little.

It's important to remember that in Fred Hoyle's universe, the universe was 
infinite in time and space. It had no beginning and no end. It simply existed, 
created only once by perhaps a god-like actor.

To make this philosophy consistent, life similarly had no beginning and no end 
either. As matter winked in and out of Hoyle's steady-state universe akin to 
water constantly refilling a leaky bucket, life migrated from one solar system to 
another in order to spread it everywhere. But life too always existed.

As I wrote earlier regarding the question of whether I would hire Hoyle, he 
certainly wouldn't have been on my short list. He did everything he could to fit 
selected facts to his preconceived notions.

There is a much milder version of panspermia that is taken somewhat seriously 
however. Conditions on Mars might well have been more clement for the origin 
of life than they were on Earth initially, and given the relatively common 
interchange of material between the inner planets in the early days of the 
solar system, under this line of thought, we might all be Martians as a result of 
a first genesis of life occurring first on Mars and then having been transported 
to Earth.

The odds of this happening are very low indeed, but they're not zero.

Wirt Atmar

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
-Ray Mummert, creationist from Dover, Pennsylvania, 2005

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