CHIEF EXPONENT OF PANSPERMIA SAYS BUDDHISM PROVIDED THE PHILOSOPHICAL BACKDROP TO THEORY OF LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

By Walter Jayawardhana

The world’s chief exponent of the theory that tells life began in deep space and reached earth riding on comets said the philosophical backdrop for his theory was provided by Buddhism. “In the 1970’s it was generally believed that the Earth must be the centre of life in the whole universe, an antithesis of Buddhist cosmology of course,” said the Cardiff University Mathematician and Astronomer Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in an interview with this writer. “It became amply clear to me that Buddhist cosmology was incredibly modern in its outlook, even perhaps post-modern. According to Buddhist texts, life is prevalent across the universe and life is not confined to Earth. Buddhism talks about a multitude of planetary systems and an infinity of “inhabited worlds”. In common with Hindu and Vedic ideas, Buddhism holds that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon,” the reputed astronomer added. “It is remarkable that the scientific position concerning life that has emerged from my work over the past 3 decades turned out to be fully consonant with this point of view” he said. Commenting on the discovery of planets around sun like other stars Professor Wickramasinghe said there is nothing special at all about our own planetary system. At a guess he would say that about one in 100 stars like the sun would have a planet like the Earth which is hospitable to life. With a 100 billion sun-like stars in the Galaxy, this gives total of a billion copies of Earth, all abundantly populated with life. If intelligence is a product of a convergent process of evolution everywhere, intelligent life will also be widespread. The Universe would then teem with intelligent life, he speculated. Commending President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s far sighted nature about the country’s security and education the Cardiff University educator said Sri Lanka will have to adopt new measures about teaching fundamental sciences like India and pointed out the Institute of Fundamental Studies which he helped to establish in Sri Lanka should play a greater role in contrast to the low profile it plays now. The following is the full interview Professor Wickramasinghe granted : Q : According to the theory that you have pioneered called panspermia life originated in space and arrived here on Earth. Can you please elaborate? A: Yes, I think life on Earth did indeed come from space in the form of micro organisms nearly 4 billion years ago; and it has continued to do so ever since. In our theory comets are the carriers of microbial life throughout the cosmos. Recent investigations of comet dust collected in the stratosphere (41 kilometres above the surface of the Earth) show definite signs of living cells which are arriving at the Earth at the present time. And there is a lot more evidence all going in the same direction. Q: If our ancestors came here from deep space, are we as human beings a part of this "universal" biological system? A: Yes. On the picture that is emerging all the crucial aspects of biological evolution were already completed long before the Earth was formed. Humans are therefore part of a cosmic evolutionary history. The progression of life and its ever-increasing diversity on Earth as evidenced in the fossil record results from the re-assembly of "evolved" genes into a multitude of life-forms. The reassembly process takes place against the background of Darwinian natural selection – survival of the fittest. We are literally children of the cosmos! Q: Amino acids have been discovered in clouds of interstellar dust. Is it possible that spores, bacteria or viruses could travel the same way, too? A: From the late 1970's my colleagues and I have been arguing that the array of complex organic molecules found in cosmic dust clouds deep in space is connected with life. A connection of this kind was of course vigorously disputed in the beginning, but now some sort of link is at last being conceded. The modern trend is to say that all these cosmic organic molecules represent early steps towards the origin of life, which is supposed to take place independently everywhere. This is to imply that the step from molecules to life is an easy one, which of course it is not. All the evidence points to the opposite – that the transformation from non-life to life is incredibly, super astronomically, improbable. In my view it is far more likely that in the interstellar organic molecules we are seeing bacterial cells and viruses, and their break-up products. I have recently argued that a first origin of life requires the resources of all the comets in all the star systems in a large fraction of cosmos. But once life has originated its dispersal is relatively easy. Bacteria and viruses are great survivors in space. Even if we allow for a very large death rate in space there would always be enough survivors to transmit the evolutionary "message" across, from one star system to another, and across the cosmos. Q: In the year of 2001 a mysterious red rain was reported in southern India , in the state of Kerala. How do you describe this phenomenon? Is there any new conclusion reached about that? A: The red rain of Kerala still remains a mystery, but it is worth noting that very similar events have been documented throughout history over thousands of years. Dr. Godfrey Louis , who studied this rain, identified “red cells” with thick cell walls, looking a little bit like algae, but not quite. Louis argued that these particles were carried in a comet fragment that exploded over Kerala, and dispersed this material in the troposphere (the cloud-forming part of the atmosphere), to act as nuclei of rain drops. I find myself in general sympathy with this point of view, although certain aspects of the data continue to puzzle me. Louis supplied me with a sample of the red rain and after several months of investigation my colleagues in the laboratory could not find a good match to any known genus of microbe on Earth. Moreover, Godfrey Louis ' claims that the cells replicate at 350 degrees C under pressure, and that there is no DNA in them. These claims are still proving difficult to verify. I think the jury is still out as to what the red rain cells really are. Q : If life travelled to our planet with comet impacts, could such impacts upon an inhabited Earth also blast life-bearing material into space and so Earth-life to other planets, too? A: My daughter Janaki Wickramasinghe (who finished her PhD in Astronomy this year) and Professor Bill Napier have recently shown that recurrent episodes of comet impacts on the Earth, after life had become established, must surely cause the expulsion of life-bearing surface material from the planet. This happens whenever the solar system passes close to a massive dust cloud, and this happens on the average once every 40 million years. Such impact events can transfer life-bearing material from Earth not only to other planets in our solar system, but to millions of newly forming planetary systems elsewhere in the Galaxy. Dr. Max Wallis and I have also given complementary arguments that make the case for such outward transfers of Earth-life even stronger. Thus it seems almost certain that we have by now “polluted" a considerable fraction of the galaxy with our own brands of Earth-life (in the form of microbial genes). And since the Earth cannot be thought of as special in any way, other life-bearing planets must also distribute and broadcast their local biological heritage. So life in the Galaxy would be genetically thoroughly mixed – the biosphere of the Earth can in a sense be thought of as linked to a galactic or cosmic biosphere. Q : So could Earth be considered a part of a chain which allowed life to spread throughout the galaxy and to settle and multiply wherever it finds the proper fertile conditions, or could it be the site of an origin itself? A: In my view, Earth would represent just one link in an endless chain. Every other life-bearing planet would similarly serve as a distribution centre for disseminating its own life, and the products of its own local evolution. It is exceedingly unlikely that Earth represented the setting for a de novo origin of life! Q: How do you connect your theory of panspermia-about life originating from space with the Darwinian Theory of evolution, and where do humans fit into your scheme? Also where does our future lie? A: We here on Earth are a brief interlude in the cosmic scheme of things, Humans, who have inhabited the planet for less than a few million years, represent just one particular assembly of cosmic genes that resulted from a long process of Darwinian-style natural selection over some 4 billion years. The Earth is continually changing. In another 8 billion years the sun would become a red giant and swallow the Earth and the inner planets. Long before that all life on Earth would have become extinct, with the boiling off of the oceans and the evaporation of our atmosphere, perhaps 2 billion years from now. But the actual life-span of humans on the planet is likely to be very much shorter. We know that the Earth has been fiercely pummelled by comet impacts throughout its history, with major extinction events (disappearances of species) taking place on the timescale of tens of millions of years. The dinosaurs became extinct due to a comet collision that took place 65 million years ago. I think an upper limit to our own lifespan as a species must be of the order of tens of millions of years, but it could even be very much shorter due to human folly – nuclear wars, degradation of the environment etc. It is however, a comforting thought that the basic genetic units that became ultimately assembled into humans are widely distributed in the cosmos. So it is highly probable, I believe, that a human-type genome would be reassembled elsewhere, and in very many places! Human-like creatures may well be walking on a multitude of other planets around other stars. Q: In your opinion, could the life forms out there in the universe be similar to the life that exists on Earth, or be completely different? A: The same suite of cosmic genes must give rise to generally similar patterns and trends in evolution. I think alien life might in general be different from Earth-life, but no more different than a dolphin is from a monkey. Q: The discoveries of new planets orbiting around sun-like stars have currently become almost a daily occurrence. What are the possibilities of extra-terrestrial intelligence and civilizations in other solar systems in our galaxy and beyond? A: Recent discoveries of planets around other stars show that planet formation is an extremely common occurrence in the Universe. So there is nothing special at all about our own planetary system. At a guess I would say that about one in 100 stars like the sun would have a planet like the Earth which is hospitable to life. With a 100 billion sun-like stars in the Galaxy, this gives total of a billion copies of Earth, all abundantly populated with life. If intelligence is a product of a convergent process of evolution everywhere, intelligent life will also be widespread. The Universe would then teem with intelligent life. Q: Could man conquer space and colonize other worlds in the future? A: I think that space travel beyond the confines of our solar system is unlikely ever to become a reality. Colonization and terra-forming of planets and moons (artificially making other planets to be like Earth) within the solar system is another matter. That may become a reality in the foreseeable future unless of course a comet or asteroid impact intervenes! Indeed if we can establish space colonies before such a disaster strikes the Earth, then Earth-bound humans would have been able to migrate to another planet, carrying with them their evolutionary heritage, culture, civilization and follies.
Q: Did your early years in Sri Lanka have an effect on your career as an astronomer? A : My growing up in Sri Lanka had profound effect on what I am today. In the nineteen fifties and sixties the sky near Colombo where I lived was pristine - free of smog and light pollution. Night after night I would watch the Milky Way arching across the sky, and from an early age I was thus drawn to Astronomy. At the age of 15 I penned a poem encapsulating my feelings: The star shines I gaze at it. I wondered How much life and love There was tonight Well, the clarity of the night sky in Sri Lanka was the first of the reasons that drew me towards astronomy. The second was my father. My father, P.H. Wickramasinghe, was an outstanding mathematical scholar who had himself studied astronomy in Cambridge . He obtained the highest honours in Mathematics (B Star Wrangler) from the University of Cambridge in the 1930’s, passed the ICS examination, and was a legend in Sri Lanka. I was fortunate to grow up in a household of such scholarship. Then there were the teachers who inspired in my formative years, both at Royal College , and at the University in Colombo . I owe deep debt of gratitude of Elmore Bruin at Royal College , and to C. J. Eliezer and Douglas Amarasekera who were my teachers at the University of Ceylon . Q: Did your background of Buddhism affect the development of your ideas on life in the Universe? A: I think it did. In the 1970’s it was generally believed that the Earth must be the centre of life in the whole universe, an antithesis of Buddhist cosmology of course. When I was in my teens I was privileged to have many conversations with a great Buddhist scholar Venerable Narada about Buddhist philosophy. It became amply clear to me that Buddhist cosmology was incredibly modern in its outlook, even perhaps post-modern. According to Buddhist texts, that life is prevalent across the universe and life is not confined to Earth. Buddhism talks about a multitude of planetary systems and an infinity of “inhabited worlds”. In common with Hindu and Vedic ideas, Buddhism holds that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. It is remarkable that the scientific position concerning life that has emerged from my work over the past 3 decades turned out to be fully consonant with this point of view. Buddhism provided me with a philosophical backdrop to my research. Q: What is the role of a small country like Sri Lanka in space exploration? A: Philosophical discussions on subjects like the universe have been part of the cultural heritage of the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Indeed our ancestors in the subcontinent have been pioneers in mathematics as well as astronomy in the past. So, tapping intellectual resources for studying abstract subjects like astronomy or mathematics should be nothing strange to countries like Sri Lanka and India . In the 21 st century a great effort is being made in countries of the “developed” world to explore the Universe and to try to understand our place within it. Tax-payers in all these countries support such ventures ungrudgingly. And the public takes a keen interest in all the developments connected with space science and space exploration. There seems to be an innate need in humans to pursue such explorations, even in times of war, terrorism and adversity. I think this interest in the Universe is what sets humans apart from all other creatures that inhabit our planet. And it is part and parcel of our cultural legacy. India being a poor country should be congratulated for investing vast sums of money for the study of fundamental science. It is this commitment to science that has inspired and local scientists and engineers and contributed to India ’s phenomenal economic regeneration. Studies in pure science – even astronomy - are therefore not a prerogative of powerful and rich countries of the West. It is an essential part of the cultural heritage of all mankind. Q: Do you have any proposals to improve those standards in Sri Lanka ? A: In the late 1970’s I was an advisor of President J.R. Jayewardene, and was instrumental in establishing the Institute of Fundamental Studies (IFS). I was the founder Director of the IFS and spent a large fraction of my time working there until, Professor Cyril Ponnamperuma took over. The IFS has fallen short of my expectation that it would be the flagship institution of pure science research in Sri Lanka . Unfortunately it has a rather low standing at the moment, both within Sri Lanka , and internationally. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has displayed great foresight in the way he is talking Sri Lanka ’s social and security problems. I have the greatest respect for him, and in this regard would bracket him with my former idol President Jayewardene. President Rajapaksa’s innovative efforts to rejuvenate education in Sri Lanka should be congratulated. But to bring our country on par with other developing countries lot of work still needs to be done particularly in establishing a good scientific profile across many fields. In the meetings I have had with H.E the President he intimated that I would use my services in an advisory capacity, and it would be a pleasure for me to give something back to the country which I love and to which I owe so much.