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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a very unusual white paper by Professor Jason T. Wright about the state of affairs in exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life, astonishingly endorsed by 126 prominent people from academia, NASA, SETI, observatories, and industry. This section starts by five of quotes from the late Professor Fred Hoyle & Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, while at Cambridge University, the two truly remarkable scholars who set in motion the modern resurgence of Panspermia back in the 1970s; this topic is the sad mirror of humanity’s self-fixation that has (nearly) obliterated our curiosity. https://lnkd.in/dTcBWgy View in LinkedIn

NEW AWAKENINGS. “The past 10 years have seen a resurgence in searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of the drivers for this include: The Big Data revolution; The privately-financed Breakthrough Listen Initiative.” But no systematic search for extraterrestrial biology. https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

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POLITICALLY SIDELINED. “Because of this lack of support, searches for technosignatures, precisely the part of the search of greatest public interest, suffers from a very small pool of trained practitioners. A major source of this issue is institutional inertia at NASA, which avoids the topic as a result of decades-past political grandstanding, conflation of the effort with non-scientific topics such as UFOs, and confusion regarding the scope of the term “SETI”.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

THE BACKWATER OF CURIOSITY. “The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade. This approach has been endorsed in prior Decadal Reviews and National Academies reports, and yet the field still receives almost no federal support in the US.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

MILESTONE FINDING ON RUSSIAN SPACESHIP (2020). “During the course of research investigation, viable spores of the microorganisms were periodically detected in the samples taken on the outer surface of the International Space Station. Among samples taken in 2016, a consortium of non-spore-forming bacteria was found on the outside of the porthole, which consisted of Agrococcus jenensis, Skermanella aerolata, Deinococcus aerolatus, and Staphylococcus hominis.” A first! https://lnkd.in/d7y7we4 View in LinkedIn

STUNNING PREDICTION. “On the nature of interstellar grains (1979), by F. Hoyle & C. Wickramasinghe. " "“The strongest of the diffuse interstellar bands are provisionally assigned to carotenoid-chlorophyll pigment complexes such as exist in algae and pigmented bacteria. The λ2200 Å interstellar absorption feature could be due to ‘degraded’ cellulose strands which form spherical graphitic particles, but could equally well be due to protein-lipid-nucleic acid complexes in bacteria and viruses. Interstellar extinction at wavelengths λ

ORGANIC MOLECULES IN SPACE PREDICTED. “Identification of the λ2, 200Å interstellar absorption feature (1977), by F. Hoyle & C. Wickramasinghe. “Here we identify this band as representing the integrated effect of a set of bicyclic compounds, each with the empirical formula C8H6N2. Such nitrogenated structures could form in stellar mass flows of the type which we have also discussed. A significant mass fraction of all interstellar material might exist in this form.” https://lnkd.in/dkEHZXn View in LinkedIn

NOT UNIQUE TO EARTH. “The implications of this point of view, which was developed in conjunction with the late Sir Fred Hoyle since the 1970s, are now becoming amenable to direct empirical test by studies of pristine organic material in the stratosphere. The ancient theory of panspermia may be on the verge of vindication, in which case the entire universe would be a grand crucible of cryomicrobiology.” (Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, 2004). https://lnkd.in/dFRBz2F View in LinkedIn