Did life come to Earth from outer space?
The notion that life somehow originated on another planet and then came to Earth via outer space holds a wistful obsession for many evolutionists. This is because:
They have been unable to explain the origin of life on Earth, and even the ”simplest” living cell is now known to be unimaginably complex.
As life has been found deeper and deeper in the fossil record,1 and so in older and older strata according to evolutionary dogma, many are now saying that there has not been enough time for life to have evolved on Earth; thus an older planet is needed.
Of course, postulating that life began on another planet does not solve the evolutionists’ problem of just how non-living chemicals could have turned into a living cell — it merely transfers it to another place.
Wanted — a planet just like Earth!
Conditions for life
The optimum place for life as we know it on Earth2 to exist elsewhere in space would be a planet with features just like those of Earth. These include having a star very like our own sun (an exceptionally stable star),3 being the right distance from its sun,4 as well as having an orbit5 and speed of rotation6 that would maintain a suitable temperature range, and hence fulfil the “Goldilocks criterion”—not too hot, not too cold, just right. Another essential would be the presence of liquid water—in living cells, water provides a liquid medium, necessary for amino acids and other organic molecules to mingle and react.7
Also needed would be an atmosphere that was non-poisonous,8 and which would also absorb or deflect lethal doses of ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays, as well as a magnetic field strong enough to deflect the solar wind (a stream of high-energy charged particles).9 Complex life forms would need oxygen to be present in the right proportion. Earth is just right for life.10
In the past, some researchers believed that Mars once fulfilled enough of these conditions for life to have existed there; however, many scientists no longer accept this. In particular, most now reject the claim that a small “Mars meteorite”, picked up in Antarctica in 1984, contained fossilised micro-organisms.11,12 And there are increasing doubts that Mars was ever as warm and as wet as thought, despite the claims of catastrophic flooding.
The latest setback for the evolutionist “true believers” is that analysis of meteorites believed to have originated from Mars has shown that the sulfur isotopes they contain were produced by atmospheric chemical reactions, not by bacteria.13 Further disappointment has been the failure of NASA’s latest two Mars missions and the loss of the Mars landing crafts.
There is, in fact, no evidence that life originated on Mars. Or for that matter on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, which may hold some liquid water, but has few, if any, of the other conditions necessary for life.
Search for other planets14
Astrobiology (or exobiology—the study of/search for extraterrestrial life) has been given a shot in the arm recently now that researchers have developed two techniques for looking for extrasolar planets, i.e. those which may orbit stars beyond our solar system.
Planets do not shine by their own light, but reflect the light they receive from the star they orbit. As this reflected light could be as feeble as one billionth of that of the host star, an indirect technique for “seeing” such planets has been devised.
As a planet revolves around its star, it and the star tug on each other with an equal and opposite gravitational force. The pull of the planet on the much more massive star causes the star to move slightly towards the planet, as the planet swings around it. This may be seen from Earth as a periodic (i.e. regularly recurring) “wobble” on the part of that star.15,16
Another technique is that, when a planet passes in front of its star, it could, slightly but periodically, dim its star’s yellow-white glow. To detect this, an observer on Earth would need to be in exactly the same plane as the planet’s orbit.
What has been found?
Using special hardware and sof