As js Princeton understates


I felt it would take to much time and space to highlight the entire board and just write no beside everything.


"IF science found" ok then i say yes to that :roll:
http://www.panspermia.org/

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After reading the one section I know the most about, http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm , I can safely say these astronomers would flunk a basic biology course.

There wasn't a monitoring system in place in 1918 that could have accurately noted the appearance of a particular influenza strain in Bombay and Boston on the same day, as claimed in the link. Only if you were completely ignorant of the knowledge we have gained about influenza could you make such naive speculation.

Interesting, as a person who tries to know a little about a lot, I have noticed several 'experts' in one field or another, who speculate how infectious diseases might be related to something in their field, yet get the infectious disease science all wrong in doing so.

There's a palentologist on the Discovery Channel who often speculates that disease caused the dinosaur die off 65 million years ago rather than an asteroid impact. His reasoning is that the die off was more gradual and began earlier, rather than abruptly at the iridium layer. I wouldn't quibble with the evidence because he would be the expert in that area. But I can quibble with the disease theory because no disease would have affected so many species that significantly at the same time, and a multiple disease theory wouldn't have been lethal to that many species at the same time. Also, disease might account for a die off where it was newly introduced, (his theory), but you'd have to have reciprocal dies offs to get the result of extinction of the dinosaurs. Otherwise the dinosaurs bringing the disease wouldn't become extinct, or the ones entering an area with a disease that was new to them might be affected but the local dinosaurs wouldn't die off.

So let that be a lesson to you child, if you are going to speculate about panspermia, you better get an astrobiology degree or you will look as foolish as these guys.

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The nonsense that Hoyle was promoting that the diffuse interstellar bands were actually freeze-dried bacteria really was an embarassment for many in the astronomical community. Here was a giant of science arguing for ubiqitous biology in interstellar space, blythely ignoring the radiation considerations, the time duration considerations, and the very horrendous problems of assuming discovered bacteria would be universally representative. Of course, Hoyle was no biologist and his attempt to marry the two fields was something of a preposterous joke.

And Wickramsinghe continues. Brilliant astronomers, just going down the completely wrong path. It's a shame, really.

Interesting, JS. I wanted to ask if Hoyle actually supported the panspermia stuff or if the other fellow had twisted something to his interpretation.

Well, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, the field of biology expanded exponentially when DNA was decoded. They didn't have that benefit.

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