Do Diseases Come From Space: Comet Controversy

Do Diseases Come from Space: Comet Controversy

By Mr Ghaz, January 6, 2009

http://u.nu/4z4g4

Do Diseases Come from Space: Comet Controversy

The colds and flu many of us suffer regularly each year may be passed to us not by our neighbors in space comers. What’s more, even medieval Europe may arrive the same way – and will ravage the earth whenever comets appear.

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This is the controversial thesis put forth by two eminent astronomers, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and Sir Fred Hoyle of Great Britain. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe claim that the dust that fills space between the stars consists of minute living organisms. Formed when the solar system was born, comets are made up of interstellar dust mixed with ice and frozen gases. When a comet visits our solar system, some of its dust drifts into the earth’s atmosphere, where the tiny organisms, they say, multiply in the congenial environment.

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Marshaling the Evidence

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Hoyle and Wickramasinghe can cite example of diseases they believe to have come from space; they even link them to a specific comet. Halley’s, for example, takes between 75 and 78 years to complete its orbit around the sun. A worldwide outbreak of Asian flu in 1957 followed a similar one 77 years earlier. The two men think that the outbreaks were caused by clouds of debris from the comet.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that smallpox has been completely eradicated. But past epidemics seem to have followed definite cycles of a few hundred years. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe believe that smallpox will reappear, carried by an as yet undiscovered comet that returns every few centuries.

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Although organisms from space may play havoc with life on earth, they are also responsible, claim the scientists, for the very appearance of life on this planet as well as for its continuing evolution.

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According to the accepted view, complex molecules necessary for life appeared on the earth when elements in the “primeval soup” of the early oceans reacted together, these evolved into primitive, viruslike creatures. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe find it incredible that chance alone could have been responsible: life must have come from outside our planet.

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To test their theory, the two astronomers studied flu outbreaks in British boarding schools. They found that flu did not spread from dormitory to dormitory, as one might think. Instead, out-breaks began randomly in different dormitories, as they might if they had been caused by organisms drifting through the atmosphere. In addition a flu epidemic in Sardinia in 1948 followed the same pattern. Once established on earth, according to the astronomers, an invading virus can bring about a permanent change in the genetic material of its host. This change is inherited by later generations. In this way, evolution occurs.

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Other astronomers disagree with this theory. They claim that the effects of interstellar dust on starlight are not what would be expected from clouds of minute living organisms. And epidemics do not seem to result from annual meteor showers – the result of dust shed by comers – that should, according to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, be disease bearing.

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For a while it seemed that the two astronomers were battling almost alone against the scientific world. Then, in 1986, space probes flying close to Halley’s comet revealed that the dust that the comet gave off contained carbon and hydrogen – two elements vital to life. And the probes discovered what were probably fragments of molecules of the type produced by living things: the core of the comet was coated with a layer of a dark, carbon-containing substance.

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Man’s closest look at a comet may help support the theories of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe.