The Art Neuro Weblog

PANSPERMIA - More Freak Than Spacefreak?
We brought up Iapetus a few weeks back. Richard Hoagland and all, which I guess places me in the woo-woo camp for now. But his articles are so compelling, I guess they deserve a read even if you choose to prejudicially dismiss the verasity of its content before going in. It's fun specualtion, right in line with the sort of 'Hard'-Sci-Fi school of specualtion. Is it good science? Probably not, but do we confine ourselves to only reading good science? Indeed, do we not read such unscientific things as say, 'New Scientist' or 'Cosmopolitan' (I certainly don't)? So in that spirit, I present to you part 6 of Iapetus theory by Richard Hoagland; courtesy of Pleiades. It's a fun read.

In particular, I do want to draw your attention to this bit:

Thus was born the exoplanet term “hot Jupiter” -- to describe MOST of these now-discovered ~150 plus worlds currently known to exist around other suns … almost all of which seem to be circling their stars either extremely close-in … or, in wildly eccentric orbits.

Both properties are the “lethal” difference between the “normal” distances and behavior of the planets in our solar system, and 99% of the so-far discovered “extrasolar worlds.” Put another way, star systems containing planets orbiting around them in orderly configurations (and distances) similar to Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. -- with additional gas giants located safely far from the inner planets and their parent star (like Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) – so far appear extremely rare … less than 1%.

The reasons for these major “exo-solar-system” anomalies (compared to the orbit spacing this solar system) are still totally unknown. What these (admittedly early) planetary statistics seem to be telling us is that Earth-like, habitable planets around other stars, orbiting within equally “friendly,” highly ordered solar systems (like this one) – thus, possessing environments capable of supporting the long-term evolution of “life among the stars” -- must be quite rare...

Well, so much for Carl Sagan's theorem. however, Hoagland goes on to argue this little nugget:

The fourth (and most striking) possibility for the existence of this profoundly bizarre, 900-mile, highly modified “base 60 world” – endlessly pursuing its precise “base 60” orbit around the most remarkable planet of this solar system – is that Iapetus was once part of an ancient, extraterrestrial program to convert this system of planets (among how many others in this Galaxy…?), from one of those myriad uninhabitable systems astronomers are finding--

Into a Special Place ….

Which could one day support the origin and evolution of Conscious Life around our Sun!

That Iapetus was, indeed— An ancient “seedship”... from the Stars.

There is no space here to provide the literally years of documentation we have painstakingly assembled in support of this (admittedly) extraordinary hypothesis. That will come later. Suffice to say that the incredible identity – between Iapetus “the moon,” and the tiny, mirror-image “replicas” found inexplicably in rock strata laid down billions of years ago on Earth – argues convincingly that there could be some kind of link between the two. The discovery of “spongy” and “charcoal-like” material inside many of these spheres, coupled with the extreme hardness of their shells, is completely consistent with the idea that these objects could have been originally intended as some kind of “protective carriers” -- for organic or biological materials!

If part of a systematic extraterrestrial program to “seed” life across the Milky Way, on previously lifeless worlds (like Earth!), such small devices could have been automatically produced elsewhere in this solar system (by the billions), to function similar to natural seed carriers known to biologists today -- a LOT of “seeds” disseminated … for every successful “implantation.”

The eerie resemblance to Iapetus could then have been far more than mere “coincidence” but, was perhaps specifically intended as 1) the means to identify different teams and seeding programs (ships?), operating on different planets and environments across the ancient solar system, or 2) to let the descendents of this “grand experiment” (when they arose … and eventually discovered even a few of the literally billions of surviving “seed” shells …) to someday successfully trace their origins--

All the way to Saturn!

Isotopic analysis -- of both Iapetus ... and these strange, terrestrial “spheres” -- could provide specific information essential to confirming or falsifying this entire “directed panspermia” hypothesis. As could biological analysis of what’s inside ….

So the 'Panspermia' theory of life in the galaxy lives on again. :) In fact, the rest iof the article goes way out to the edge of woo-woo-land, where woo-woo-vikings hunt for woo-woo-whales. Sorry, I had to slip that motif in this week. Anyway, it's a slow Sunday morning. I hope that made your morning, boys & girls.

- Art Neuro