“In 2004, a bizarre new twist in the panspermia debate came in the form of a quite revolutionary press release from NASA. The story claimed that, using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, astronomers had detected faint radio emissions, giving the signature of a sugar called glycolaldehyde. They were coming from a giant interstellar gas cloud dubbed Sagittarius B2, located close to the centre of the galaxy.
Since glycolaldehyde – an eight-atom molecule made up of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen – can act to create the simple amino acids necessary to form life, NASA now felt it extremely likely that the building blocks of life first existed in deep space, and were transported here by a comet. This discovery came just two years after the spectral ‘fingerprint’ of glycose, a simple amino acid, was detected in three interstellar gas clouds, one of which was Sagittarius B2.
For a space organisation of the calibre of NASA to have detected such information meant that panspermia was now being taken very serious indeed. Yet, it took until October 2005 for NASA to announce finally that organic compounds called PAHS (polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons) were not only ‘abundant in space’ but, most significantly, had more in common with life on Earth than had previously been recognised.
New Scientist magazine reported that Douglas Hudgins and his colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffat Field, California, initiated a search for PAHS using the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 25 August 2003. Their initial findings revealed that not only do PAHS exist everywhere in the galaxy, but that a high percentage contain nitrogen.
As plain as this discovery might seem, nitrogen-containing compounds are found in chlorophyll, DNA, and haemoglobin, a fact which more-or-less confirms that carbon-based organisms evolved originally in deep space, and only afterwards made the journey here.”
This extract was titled ‘Sugar and space’ in ‘the Cygnus mystery’ by Andrew Collins
How did all this lead to humans being on Earth? Could we claim that Earth was prepared specially for us? If so, why?
RAJA ARASA RATNAM 