This World Is Not Enough
The first fragments of the theory that life on Earth has been a result of ancient microbes or bacteria arriving from outer space emerged from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who during his cosmological ruminations mentioned swarms of particles or ‘seeds’. [1] Some scholars have interpreted this as meaning life has come from elsewhere, and far from being a fringe theory today, panspermia has become a leading topic of scientific debate among biologists and immunologists. [2] Interestingly, as the Earth has been heating up, a new collection of ancient microbes have been revealing themselves from the ice. A recent discovery of 3.7-billion-year-old microbes in Greenland has pushed back the evidence of life on Earth by 220 million years. [3]
[1] Eric Lewis, ‘Anaxagoras and the Seeds of a Physical Theory’, Apeiron, vol. 33, no. 1, 2000.
[2] Stephen Fleischfresser, ‘Over our Heads: A Brief History of Panspermia’, Cosmos Magazine, 24 April 2018, cosmosmagazine.com/biology/over-our-heads-a-brief-history-of-panspermia; and Edward J. Steele, ‘Cause of Cambrian Explosion: Terrestrial or Cosmic?’, Progress in in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, vol. 36, August 2018, sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798?via%3Dihub; all accessed 14 February 2020.
[3] Marc Kaufman, ‘On the Ground in Greenland’, NASA Astrobiology News, 10 September 2019, astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/on-the-ground-in-greenland; accessed 15 May 2020.
Title Image:
James Tunks
Still from This World Is Not Enough, 2020
Multi-channel HD video
9 minutes, looped
Courtesy of the artist