4 ms·

What's so tiresome about panspermia?

• Udo 14y ago
  There is usually not a lot of actual science involved. The motivations for presenting panspermia papers are in most cases philosophical in nature and it shows. This paper, too, implies that's what happened even though the accuracy of the model is highly dubious for a number of reasons. Compare that to when Hubble first attempted to calculate the age of the universe by measuring the history of its expansion. It was quite a similar method: simply roll the equation back in time to where the universe's size was zero. He got a result that was lower than the geologically known age of the Earth, in fact we now know he was off by a factor of ten! Refreshingly, people didn't jump to conclusions though and in time everything fell into place. Hubble had fallen victim to a systematic measuring error. We are also now pretty certain that the expansion of the universe was not always linear. Hubble's method is still valid and impressive, but the tools and models needed to be refined. It's easy to see that the same applies to this finding.