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

 

James Tunks graduated as Meisterschüler of Film from the Städelschule Hochschüle für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main (Prof. Douglas Gordon and Laure Prouvost). Selected exhibitions include Home of the Brave, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Instant Karma with Florian Waldvogel, Hamburg; and Vanishing, Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt am Main. He is co-founder of Galerie Main, an independent curatorial and exhibition program currently based in Melbourne.