Cosmic Impact by Andrew May

Author:Andrew May [Andrew May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785784941
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

We conclude that about a thousand tons of Martian rocks rain down on Earth each year. Perhaps the same amount reaches Earth from the Moon. In retrospect, we didn’t have to go to the Moon to retrieve Moon rocks. Plenty come to us, although they were not of our choosing and we didn’t yet know it during the Apollo programme.

The Alien Octopus

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s theory about viruses coming from outer space opened the floodgates to a whole new field of speculation. What about more complex organisms – octopuses, for example?

In the Victorian sci-fi classic War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells had one character describe the Martian invaders as ‘octopuses’. It was a good choice, because octopuses really do look alien to human eyes. They’re unusual in other ways, too, with higher intelligence and more complex behaviour than any other invertebrate. When the octopus genome was sequenced in 2015, it was found to possess more protein-coding genes than our own species. Somewhat over-excitedly, the official press release described the result as ‘the first sequenced genome from an alien’.

It was meant figuratively, of course – but some people took the idea to heart. In 2018, an academic paper by a number of authors – including Chandra Wickramasinghe – picked up on the fact that so much of that highly complex genome was ‘new’, in the sense that it wasn’t found in any of the octopus’s supposed ancestral species. The authors suggested the situation was easier to explain in terms of an extraterrestrial origin – via DNA brought to Earth by cometary impacts – than through the natural process of evolution:

Given that the complex sets of new genes in the octopus may have not come solely from horizontal gene transfers or simple random mutations of existing genes or by simple duplicative expansions, it is then logical to surmise, given our current knowledge of the biology of comets and their debris, the new genes and their viral drivers most likely came from space.

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