Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine a comet hurtling through the nothingness of space. It smashes into a planet, causing destruction, but also bringing life. That's because hitching a ride on the surface of the comet were tiny traces of organic material or even alien eggs, explaining how life could spread
across the cosmos and arrive on our planet. Pant Spermia, meaning seeds Everywhere, is the name of the theory that life on Earth may have cosmic origins, and it's been both debated by scientists and featured in works of science fiction. Now a group of nearly three dozen scientists from around the world are putting a tweak in the theory, suggesting not that Earth's earliest life had outer space origins, but
that panspermia may be responsible for the Cambrian explosion. That's a point in Earth's history approximately four hundred and fifty one million years ago when most major animal groups appear in the fossil record. In their article cause of Cambrian Explosion Terrestrial or Cosmic, published in eighteen issue of the
journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular biology. Thirty three scientists tie the rise of unique animals tartegrades, octopuses, and the bevy of other odd and unique animals that flourished at that time to pan spermia, suggesting that many of these relatively bizarre and never before seeing creatures descend from organic
alien material. The author's right. It takes little imagination to consider that the Precambrian mass extinction event was correlated with the impact of a giant lifebearing comet and the subsequent seating of Earth with new cosmic derived cellular organisms and viral genes. But we haven't cracked the mystery of life's origins just yet. This new paper isn't built on any new discoveries or research. It's a literature review that, for the most part, references the author's own existing work. But
that's by design. The authors acknowledge. They write, we are acutely aware that mainstream thinking on the or gin and further evolution of life on Earth is anchored firmly in the terrestrial paradigm. Our aim here is to facilitate further discussion in the biophysical, biomedical, and evolutionary science communities. Panspermia is at this point only a concept, but it dates back well before the last hundred years or so of
modern science fiction. Way back at the turn of the eighteenth century, French diplomat and natural historian Benois de May proposed that life across the cosmos could have been seeded from space, and a few scholars even interpret ancient Greek philosopher and Axagorus of Clazomenas musings along the same lines. He spoke vaguely of cosmic seeds two thousand, five hundred
years ago. The paper has already drawn skepticism after biologist Francis Westall, for instance, points out that while some forms of extremophile life have been observed surviving in the vacuum of space for short periods of time, this new paper suppositions would require eggs, embryos, or other cells survived thousands of years, if not more, in space. West All told Newsweek when discussing the paper, Unfortunately, it is all too easy to pull information out of the literature to support
one's hypothesis. Nature is incredible, and I do not think it is necessary to call on extraterrestrials to explain it. An alternate theory for the Cambrian explosion goes by the name Snowball Earth, and it suggests that seven fifteen million years ago our planet became encased in ice for a hundred and fifty million years, killing most existing life forms, and that a massive thought allowed for an explosion of biodiversity. Today's episode was written by Christopher Hasseiotis and produced by
Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other life affirming topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.