So leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved. — Dennis V. Lindley Replies to Cosmic Ancestry, 1997-98Subject: Re: Thanks and ... do me? Dear Brig, I just discovered a bookmark in my browser I made several months ago named THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. It is a masterpiece about the subject. It appeared you are the author. Congratulations!. I am really impressed. You must be physicist ?! The article has a great layout too, looking like colorful magazine pages. I would suggest a title or subtitle: 'two kinds of entropy' or 'Entropy and Biology' or 'Entropy and Evolution', which would attract more readers. Did you notice that your name is not on the whole page ??? I am going to make a link to this page on my Yockey page!
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the referenced CA webpage. Subject: Balloon experiment etc Dear Brig: ...Will you be interested in placing this letter that Fred and I have published in The Independent (London) today: Microorganisms from the Leonid Meteor StreamRecent comments on the crossing of the Leonid meteor stream have all overlooked an interesting and potentially important consequence. It is now widely accepted that comets carry complex organic molecules including amino acids that might at the very least have been connected with the beginnings of life on this planet. And there are also serious discussions in progress in scientific circles of the even more radical possibility of cometary panspermia of the type we pioneered in the late 1970's. The importance of the present crossing of the Leonids is that the source comet Tempel-Tuttle (which has a period of 33 years) came closest to the sun on the last occasion only 9 months ago, so the Earth will be in receipt of freshly evaporated cometary particles over the next few days. Spectacular meteor shows are caused by the entry of particles of sizes typically larger than a grain of sand, which burn up as they plough into the Earth's high atmosphere at a speed of some 70 kilometres per second. Besides these larger particles the meteor stream will also contain, perhaps in comparable mass, a population of bacterial sized particles. We have shown that particles of the sizes of micrococci or smaller travelling at 70 kilometres per second would be flash-heated to temperatures upto about 200 degrees Celsius for brief intervals of the order of seconds, after which they will be slowed down to reach the stratosphere. (See for instance our book Diseases from Space (J.M. Dent, 1979). In several laboratory experiments it has been demonstrated that bacteria retain viability under such conditions of flash heating in a near vacuum. Laboratory experiments have also shown that bacteria that become deactivated through exposure to ultraviolet light (as might happen after 9 months in orbit) are easily reactivated, through the operation of enzymes, when the source of radiation is removed. Thus the possibility of viable microorganisms from Comet Tempel-Tuttle reaching the Earth cannot be ruled out. The average daily input of cometary dust to the Earth is estimated at about 50 tonnes. A ten-thousand fold increase in this quantity over a couple of days seems likely, leading to a total mass of the order of a million tonnes. If as little as one part in a thousand of this is in the form of viable microorganisms the total number of microbes drifting down to the Earth will be a staggering 10^23! N.C. Wickramasinghe Subject: cosmic ancestry piece The online piece "can the theory be tested" was very well-written, engaging, compelling and informative. Although I am not a scientist I have an interest in science. Your explanation makes perfect sense to me. The discussion about DNA--especially about genes for use in future evolution was exciting to read. You wrote that the Cosmic Ancestry theory "holds that evolution is the expression of the genetic programs that are available." In my field of work, metaphysics, it is understood that life on any scale is an expression of an existing energy pattern or available set of energies. Your "thin evidence" was pretty damn intriguing and thought provoking. I look forward to seeing the theory developed in the months and years ahead. I am sure it will be part of a major paradigm shift in the scientific community as it expands and deepens its understanding of the nature of the universe and Earth's relationship to it.
Subject: !wow! Brig, Your site is incredible! Is there anything we can do to help / support / sponsor you? I've been very interested in setting up a Scientific Advisory Board to 'peer review' and catalog excellent scientific and technical websites. Your site is a prime example of something that is terrific on the web that can't be found by Biosis or Medline anonymous Subject: contamination of Orgueil meteorite? Date: week of September 14, 1998 From: two respondents To: bklyce@panspermia.org via newsgroups We agree that Tan and VanLandingham's fossil found in Orgueil is probably a magnetotactic bacterium. Could it be an earthly contaminant? [Klyce replies:] In another 1967 article, VanLandingham, Sun and Tan examined additional samples of Orgueil specifically in order to deal with the question of contamination (1). This time they used an ultra-thin sectioning method, to be sure of viewing fossils that were completely integrated into the rock. They did find biological looking structures, but by the sectioning method, none of the photos is as convincing as the obvious magnetotactic bacterium published earlier the same year. In fact, the researchers excluded some forms as likely contaminants, on morphological grounds, before publishing their photos. [Question: Were the obvious contaminants mineralised?] In a 1965 article, VanLandingham used acid on powdered samples to reveal acid-resistant structures in the Orgueil and Alais meteorites (2). This is the same method that would be employed to find the magnetotactic bacterium photographed the following year. On morphological grounds, a magnetotactic bacterium would not have been excluded then, because magnetotactic bacteria were unknown in 1965-1967. But it's a "catch-22", to exclude every form that is known on Earth. By that method, as soon as a meteoritic fossil becomes identified as a known species, it gets ruled a contaminant. In Cosmic Ancestry, germs in meteorites will be similar to ones on Earth. So, for bacterial fossils at least, other means of screening contaminants must be used. Although the Orgueil meteorite was seen as it fell and fragments were collected within hours, bacteria could have been introduced during those hours. Furthermore, the sample was not always properly isolated in storage, and was occasionally mishandled by today's standards. [Question: Could a magnetotactic bacterium have plausibly been introduced under these circumstances?] VanLandingham says that many such bacteria were seen in their sample, all aligned in the same direction. To become mineralized this way, the bacteria must have been in a fluid medium. There is ample evidence that water once flowed through the veins of carbonaceous chondrites, but was there an opportunity for the matrix to liquify after the meteorite fell? If not, the alignment seems to count against the contamination argument. Of course, there are numerous other examples of fossils in meteorites that can't be contaminants, because they were photographed immediately after a fresh sample was broken open, or they are obviously embedded in a matrix known to be extraterrestrial, or they have unearthly isotope ratios, for example. [Question: Could the original fossil be tested for isotope ratios? It was given to the Rijksmuseum in Stockholm.] In conclusion, we believe the fossil is indigenous, but based on current knowledge, we can't exclude the possibility that this fossil is an earthly contaminant. 1. VanLandingham, S. L.; C. N. Sun and W. C. Tan. "Origin of Round-body Structures in the Orgueil Meteorite," p 252-253 v 216 Nature, 21 October 1967. Subject: directed panspermia I commend your well-researched web-site. I would like to refer you to my papers in Planetary and Space Science 1997, 45, 653-664 and Icarus 1997, 129, 245-253, on the microbial nutrient effects of carbonaceous chondrite materials. These support that such materials could have hosted life or helped in its origins. In particular, I would like to refer you to my papers on Directed Panspermia in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1979, 32, 419-423, which was quoted in Crick's book, and especially in JBIS 1997, 50, 93-102, which show and why civilisations similar to ours would implement directed panspermia. Reprints are available. Best regards Michael N. Mautner Subject: cosmic ancestry Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 19:14:51 +0000 From: "Alvaro Garcia" Dear Dr. Klyce: I hope you remember me. I sent you two e-mails on the 13 and 18 May (which you answered). Now I write from my own e-mail address. Concerning my second e-mail, although Leakey and Lewin say that after the Cretaceous-Paleocene extinction, speciation only took thousands of years, I read another author who thinks it took millions of years. Leakey and Lewin also said there were no Iridium traces in the Permian-Triassic extinction. However, two meteorites fell on Earth 220 MY ago: one on Puchezh-Katunki (Russia), leaving a crater of 80 km diameter, and the other one on Saint Martin (Canada), leaving a crater 40 km wide. Another one fell 212 MY ago on Manicougan (Quebec), with a crater 100 km wide. However, since there was also active volcanism at that time (cause or effect, it is not known), and there is a lot of Iridium in the Earth mantle, dust from explosions could also have contributed to extinctions. It is also interesting that the first fossil stromatolites are on an Australian crater. Also, one meteorite fell on Sudbury (Ontario) 1850 MY ago, leaving a crater 200 km wide; and another one 1685 MY ago, on Teague (Australia)., 30 km wide. That period saw the appearance of eucariotes. Another meteorite fell 570 MY ago, just the date of the start of the Cambrian (and, therefore, Paleozoic). Another one fell on Siljan (Sweden), 368 MY ago, just before the Devonian-Carboniferous extinction (algo caused by drought), leaving Iridium traces. Still another one 35 MY ago, on Popigai (Russia) marking the Eocene-Oligocene extinction (associated with cold). Although the meteorite which fell about 15 MA ago on Germany did not disturb much continental fauna, its length was only 100 m. Finally, a meteorite fell on Vredefort (South Africa) the 28 a.D. Could it have left consequences elsewhere?. Yours sincerely We are a colombian foundation that received as a donation a meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite CO3. On this meteorite we found something we want to show you as an expert in this field to get your opinion.(Photo 0007) [top left below] Attached are the scanning electron images and microprobe data from the sample, it was not coated, we want to know what conclusive test can be made to the specimen to determine, if it is what we think it is. Can you help us? We don't want to proceed with tests that would make us take the same path as Nagy or that could easily be contradicted. If you need to see more photos or data, will you please let us know. Thanks, Biotech. I referred these researchers to Richard Hoover and Michael Engel. Others who wish to contact them may do so at biotech@openway.com.co Subject: Re: photos in chondrite If is not too much to ask, could you change or include the following on your feedback page? We concluded from the preliminary testing done that:
The Foundation is doing all it can to continue the study, but this is really expensive, the cost of the complete protocol of test is well over our capacity, so the testing is going slowly but with very carefully planned steps. We are preparing a press release with all the data obtained, the preliminary protocol and the feedback received from the leading scientists we have contacted. Can you help us find contacts to fund the study? This is a copy from the latest request we have been sending. Thanks, I was interested to find this extremely well designed and thought-provoking site. Although I keep an open mind about these theories, I was (and still am) very critical of H&W 's approach to analysing statistics from epidemics. Some years ago I presented a paper on the subject to the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics. This paper was was never published but is now available on http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucaksjs/COMWEB2.html. Regards, Stephen Senn [Klyce Replies] Dear Stephen -- I am glad to hear from you. Thank you for your kind comments about my site. I have saved the text of the paper to which you pointed me for further study, after which I may have more to say. I have never thought that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's disease statistics were very compelling by themselves, with one exception -- the whooping cough cycle. I will have to find the reference, but as I recall, whooping cough epidemics come every 3.4 years, like clockwork. When a vaccine was developed, the frequency did not change, only the amplitude. They think comet Encke is implicated. Do you know anything about this example? [Senn replies, Sun, 26 Apr 1998 15:22:22 +0100] Dear Brig, Gosh that was quick! I don't know about the whooping cough cycle (but see below). I have once or twice tried to get H and W to address the problem of mathematical epidemiology seriously (I have written twice to W.) but without success. They have not replied. It remains a mystery to me why two such able mathematicians should make such elementary mistakes. Particularly revealing I find is that Neyman (with no axe to grind) used the same distributions for clustering patterns of bombs as for person-to person transmission. (See my paper) In other words both cometary infall and "conventional" disease models imply clustering. Hence, saying that because you have clustering you can't have person to person transmission is just silly. (I note from your excellent site that W. repeated this falacious argument with the Eton data at the creationism versus evolution trial.) In fact traditionally, clustering has often been taken as an indication of infectivity. It may be that whooping cough is difficult to explain but I would be very cautious before jumping to conclusions. Bartlett showed how periodicity could arise with measles in a paper back in the fifties. I am not well up on this general topic any more. My research is all in statistics for drug development nowadays and I was only ever an amateur in the field of person to person transmission. However my colleague Valerie Isham is a world expert. I shall try found out more from her. However, one point could be investigated simply. Person to person transmission implies that the unimmunised will benefit from "herd immunity" provided that enough other people take up vaccination programmes. The H&W hypothesis presumably implies that you are at the same risk in you are unvaccinated, how ever many others are. It might be that this could be studied simply for whooping cough, ... By the way. Do you also share my opinion that H&W have always been curiously silent on the subject of Immanuel Velikovsky? Regards, Stephen [Klyce replies] Dear Stephen -- The trial at which Wickramasinghe repeats the Eton data was 1981 after all. All of my reference material is at my office, but the whooping cough thing was compelling. They publish a graph showing spikes every 3.4 years. Then when the vaccine comes in, the spikes remain, right on the established beat, but not as tall. The previous explanation for such periodicity (was it Bartlett's?) would have predicted that the period should get longer (slower beats). I would love to know what you learn. -- Brig Human Pathogenic Infections From Space-Borne Particles, by J. Bechert, of Texas A&M, 17 November 1998, has the relevant graph and other related information. Dear Dr. Klyce, Just a very brief note to let you know how much I am enjoying your website. I have been studying Dr. Hoyle's contributions since I was a kid - his steady state theory - and since 1983 when I read his most interesting book: The Intelligent Universe. And I've spent alot of time in the library reading his various papers. There's no doubt in my mind that this theory of Cosmic Ancestry will shortly be thoroughly vidicated and accepted by the scientific community at large. I appreciate your efforts more than I can tell you! Best regards!! Alan Aeschliman | Director of Research | United Chemical Corporation Dear Sir, I was recently at http://www.panspermia.org/ and found it a well constructed web site to which you have obviously devoted alot of thought and time. However, I think that you overstate the plausibility of your theory. The problems are larger than that it would move the problem of life's origin to a remote venue. Don't get me wrong it is possible that life originated elsewhere, and I don't personally mind the idea but lets be honest - the very little that we know is not consistent with that notion the specifics appear below. Basically, if you are going to ask an organism to seed life on earth by traveling between the stars it is highly unlikely that it would find itself on another habitable planet. Even if it did find the right planet it would have to arrive at the right time because, as you know, current estimates of the earliest life indicate that it arose very shortly (in geological terms) after the planet became habitable. Even then it would have to survive reentry. But if all the conditions are just right your organisms will make it but the chances are now vanishingly small. As I see it the only way to make it at all even remotely plausible would be if there were an awful lot of these organisms out there, and they were falling in all the time. You should be able to make a rough estimate of how many there might be in the interplanetary or interstellar medium. Now consider all of the meteorites and interplanetary dust particles that we have collected in the upper atmosphere, and the probes that have collected interplanetary dust. I think that you will find that we should have found more bacteria than we have. Anticipating such a question you claim that "We already have some indirect evidence - the fossils from carbonaceous chondrites (meteorites) like Orgueil, Ivuna, Allende and Murchison." That is not true. The organic compounds in Murchison (for example) are not at all what we would expect to see if they came from organisms like us. Even if damaged or destroyed bacteria should leave molecular fragments that are fairly distinct (if they are our progenitors then they are like us right?). But what we have seen in the meteorites is inconsistent with this notion. Most of the molecules have nothing to do with life. Even those that may appear to at first (even the chiral diastereomers measured by Cronin) are really more consistent with non-biotic synthesis. Not only are many of the amino acids non-biological but the distribution of deuterium and carbon-13 in the natural ones is not what one would expect from a biology anything like ours. Similarly, there is nothing in the Pia and Puma data (Giotto) that can't be explained by current non-biological chemistry. You also point out that bacterial and viruses have been detected in the water and air. Fine, but this is also consistent with what one might expect in an ocean on or an atmosphere above a thriving planet. No bacteria have been found on the interplanetary dust particles that are collected at the top of the atmosphere by NASA's U2 aircraft, although they now have analyzed many bonafide extraterrestrial particles. Although its not my area, it seems to me that if the Earth were still experiencing a continuous rain of bacteria of the same kind that started life here long ago then we would see very old organisms that would be identical to if not very similar to what is observed today. If we all evolved from this organism it would be really easy to root the tree of life as the last common ancestor would be an extant (or recent) organism. So in the end what we are left with is this: For your theory to work many many things must be just right, and you must explain alot of data that is not consistent. The alternative, that life developed here, requires only the conditions on Earth must have been hospitable, and is completely consistent with what we know. Since I think that you are a fair person and confident of your theory I hope that you will post this letter in an appropriate place on your web site. Thank you for your time and consideration. Dr. Max Bernstein Subject: your theory is quack. . . . QUACK QUACK QUACK!!! ha ha!! What did the waiter say to the duck? Do you want quackers with your soup?? LOL (laughing out loud). Anyway, I was just wondering, do you have a color copier at Acorn? I love you! Love, anonymous Subject: Saturday morning at panspermia... Good morning. Your site is certainly more elegant and passionate than any I've seen.. your pictures are goregous. But none as good as the picture of you with Polly! I think you picked one where she looks gloriously lovely.... and looks like you! We have talked about this before, but you have Godel's theorem backwards. (yes you do). You say he shows that 'knowledge can't be complete and grounded in something else'. I looked for a source to quote, and came up with Encarta 95. "Godel became famous for a paper, published in 1931, setting forth what has become known as Godel's proof. This proof states that the propositions on which the mathematical system is in part based are unprovable because it is possible, in any logical system using symbols, to construct an axiom that is neither provable or disprovable within the same system." [I've got the cheap e-mail that can't italicize 'within the same system'] "To prove the consistency of the system, methods of proof from outside the system are required." What I have understood as the upshot of Godel's theorm is that, using your terms, 'knowledge [in any sufficiently complicated system] can't be complete without being grounded outside (and truly, logically, above, or in a super-system) itself.' Again, using your terms, 'completeness and self-groundedness are mutually exclusive' [italics self-]. Maybe that is what you mean, but it isn't clear. Also... you speak of 'wispy potential...[existing through]...long quiescent periods of waiting in space... eventual emergence on planets...' You have the code waiting in space for planets to cool and expand out to it (roughly), right? But I thought that space itself (space in which a virus might wait) was itself part of the universe... what is extra-universal space. You assume that space is eternal, waiting for matter to explode into it (or, what you really seem to think, waiting for a new local explosion of matter while managing the results of various more distant explosions). You have happily let you mind roam to a playground of eternal, probably infinite, space in which eternal matter keeps changing form, banging and unbanging, or just repeat banging. You speak of the likelihood of something like this, compared to the likelihood of the neo-darwinian explanations. If you apply Occam's Razor to this beard, you will get the best shave with a God who wanted to share his eternal life, a life of community and love between a father and son, with someone else who could appreciate and joy in it. First he had to create the someone else. Now this is very strange and singular, and from a scientific point of view inelegant... but when you learn about sexual intercourse that at first seems strange, singular, and inelegant. It is those things... but that's life. Science has found regularity and elegance serve it well... but the beginning of life, whether yours and mine or the universes, simply must not be bound under those auspices. [...]
The Beginning, contains the referenced discussion of Gödel. Subject: Cosmic Ancestry Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 15:29:32 -0800 From: John Stahlke I finally read the entire web site today. You have truly amassed a wealth of information relative to the origin of life. It is of particular interest to me that, while directed panspermia asserts that abiogenesis here on earth is an impossible process, cosmic ancestry asserts that both abiogenesis and macroevolution are impossible processes. I think you are absolutely correct about that, but the Universities of the world are so locked into Darwinian gradualism and Dawkins' brand of "Natural selection does everything" that you must receive much ridicule. I will, too. In my nearly complete "Laws of Physics, Laws of God" I offer a new hypothesis that popped into my head late one Friday night in March of 1995. It relates information and energy as follows: "Energy, acting alone, cannot create information, and preexisting information, acted upon by energy acting alone, will be destroyed." If true, and I believe it to be, abiogenesis and macroevolution are impossible just as you have concluded. I have dubbed this the seventh hypothesis. It means that perpetual motion machines of the seventh kind are impossible to build. Machines that you just plug into the wall that then write novels, history books, compose music or create new computer software are impossible. It is a falsifiable statement, so meets Popper's criterion for being scientific. There is the problem of defining information. In my narrow definition, books written about snowflakes contain information, but snowflakes do not. Books written about DNA contain information, but unlike water molecules, DNA does contain information. It seems almost too obvious, almost trivial. One physicist I tried it on said he agreed it was falsifiable, and went on to state that it has already been falsified because life currently exists, therefore abiogenesis must have occurred! I think your site effectively demolishes neo-Darwinism. Michael Denton, Michael Behe, Phillip Johnson and others have also done so, but biologists are sticking to their religion with fervor. Good luck with Cosmic Ancestry. You'll need it. Regards, Dear Brig: [Klyce] I think there is an unnecessary assumption in this reasoning: that life has an origin in nonlife Excuse me? Didn't we just cover Occam's Razor? The idea that life originated in nonlife is the most likely hypothesis by far. To counter this assumption, you would have to demonstrate how life could squeeze through the Big Bang, for which there is abundant evidence, especially the part where matter is not organized into atoms but is instead a sea of elementary particles and radiation dominates the universe. Indirect evidence is more abundant and would include, for example, the latest news about comets the size of houses arriving at the rate of thousands per day and breaking up much higher than we would have predicted. The high breakup would allow bacterial spores to be delivered to the atmosphere without being killed by heat.Okay, so you don't have a scientific background - I expected that. Recent commentators have pointed out that, if the infall rate was as high as the originator of this story reported, this would create an atmosphere on the Moon that, although perpetually bleeding away into space, would continually be replenished by the high infall rate. No atmosphere on the Moon, no infall (at least not as large an amount of matter as reported). This was a counter-argument that had to be supplied to the public, it was obvious to those of us who think about these things daily. and breaking up much higher than we would have predicted. The high breakup would allow bacterial spores to be delivered to the atmosphere without being killed by heat.To be killed instead by intense UV and energetic solar wind particles? You may want to think this through more fully. The meteorite hypothesis is more plausible because the central core of a large body would not heat up very much during its transit through the atmosphere. Paul Lutus Subject: You are HMS Beagle's web pick Congratulations! Cosmic Ancestry has been chosen as HMS Beagle's "Web Pick of the Day", and will be featured on our home tomorrow (5/2) with a link to your site. Your site will then be featured in our "Favorite Web Sites" section. We appreciate the feedback you sent which alerted us to your site (in fact we are planning a Cutting Edge debate on this subject). HMS Beagle is a webzine for biological and medical researchers, with a daily digest of the highest-quality Web resources and published material. We were recently selected as one of Yahoo's "32 most incredibly useful" Web sites, and have thousands of visitors daily. Please place a reciprocal link back to our Home Page at: http://hmsbeagle.com [...] Sincerely, HMS Beagle, at BioMedNet [registration required].
Dear Mr. Klyce, I just finished downloading and reading all of the pages on your website. First of all, let me congratulate you on a job well done. You created the website that I had always dreamed of writing. I have long been a follower of Sir Fred Hoyle and a believer in the extra-terrestrial origins of life. In fact, for the past several years I have defended these views on the CompuServe science and math forum. Needless to say, I encountered a great amount of ridicule and hostility. I probably have tens of megabytes of postings on this subject that have appeared since 1993. I thought of writing a book on panspermia and darwinian evolution but Michael Behe wrote the book I wanted to write and now you have successfully created the website. It is surprising that so many people still cling to the darwinian paradigm despite mountains of evidence that refute it. While Cosmic Ancestry is not a proven fact, and as you correctly state, the evidence is thin, it is more believable to me than life arising de novo on a barren earth. I hope I live long enough to see solid proof that life exists outside the earth. I am most interested in a comparison of the DNA code of earth organisms and any extra-terrestrial forms. If life arose separately in different locations around the universe, the chances of the genetic code being the same would be vanishingly small. On the other hand, if the DNA code was the same, it would be strong evidence to support cosmic ancestry. Again, this is a wonderful and informative site and I will pass it along to my friends and students. Regards, Charlie Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 17:03:00 -0500 It's funny, I just looked down at my shirt and there was written "706 Union Ave, Memphis, Tennessee". It is a Sun Studios shirt my brother got when he was in Memphis. I guess you're not very far away from there! I've just started using this Netscape mailbox and I'm a little unsteady. Glad it turned out OK. I teach chemistry and physics in a high school near New York City. I try to get my point across whenever I can and my colleagues are always kidding me about my aversion to darwinian evolution. I've got to be *real* careful in how I present it though, because it must be even-handed and totally factual since most scientists who oppose Darwin are labelled as religious creationists, which I am definitely not. I don't want to seem like I'm proselytizing my own views. Keep up the good work. Regards, Charlie | |||||