On 01/12/2021 23:52, Sylvia Else wrote:
> On 02-Dec-21 10:42 am, skybuck2000 wrote:
>> Gravitational waves seem to be real.
>>
>> Thus perhaps virusses are propelled by Gravitational Waves.
>>
>> This could mean that these virusses are weapons of war from space ! :P
Not an original idea.
Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinge had it but (and I didn't know this) the
Swedish Nobel laureate of 1903 Arrhenius got there first. It has never
been a popular theory since it just puts back the origin of life one
more level.
> Viruses are intricately tied to the way our cellular chemistry works.
> They certainly evolved from life on Earth.
It is far likely that viruses are much more closely related to the
original life on Earth than we are. They have coevolved with cellular
life forms since the very beginning of life on Earth.
Bare RNA viruses and virions are quite probably the last remaining
relics of RNA world. Still effective enough to exploit the present day
world of multicellular complex organisms they have never really had to
evolve much they just replicate with a few errors every now and then.
Fred Hoyle thought that viruses might arrive with comets or meteors.
Panspermia is still a just about a viable hypothesis.
Who knows what a mission to a comet core might find. If we ever find
even simple life that evolved independently elsewhere then we will learn
an enormous amount about how many arbitrary choices there are about the
chemistry that can store and replicate genetic information.
--
Regards,
Martin Brown