Which was it - virus-guided evolution or cryofrozen eggs? That piece is all over the map.
And it begs the question: why is alien life DNA-based at all? Without addressing that, its just a comedy piece.
And it begs the question: why is alien life DNA-based at all? Without addressing that, its just a comedy piece.
> In our considered view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues leads to the bare minimum yet plausible scientific conclusion – that life was seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (at or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells and organisms (e.g. Tardigrades), perhaps even fertilised ova and plant seeds, may have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth helping to drive further the progress of terrestrial biological evolution.
EDIT: Further in the paper they talk specifically about the octopus in more detail:
> Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted (below) as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus' sudden emergence on Earth ca. 270 million years ago.
Full disclosure: I'm a software engineer not a biologist, so the next bit is my interpretation that could be wrong:
As I get it from the paper they seem to suggest that octopi came into being either due to genes inserted into a terrestrial ancestor whereby the genes came from space. OR by the landing of extraterrestrial eggs on our planet.
I imagine that Punctuated Equilibrium is a far simpler explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
Or is it a DNA argument. Then I'm back to why DNA at all unless everything is alien. In which case, why the article. Its like "there's this one alien guy in Idaho..." instead of "There's other intelligent life in the universe!!!"
I'm not saying the 33 scientists weren't well aware of these considerations, though.
If the leap in complexity of octopuses is so obvious that we can tell it's an alien, do you mean other earlier life in our planet was not alien? That would not make sense because it would be hard to imagine that two independent evolutions of life led to the same protein-based, DNA-based life. So the only reasonable theory is that both the earlier life in our planet as well as octopuses are aliens which is JoeAltmaier's point.
JoeAltmaier's wasn't the one introducing the idea of panspermia. His point was, instead: "why even write this paper focusing on octopi if all life is alien" and my answer was, 'cause this is the one time you can really prove that (according to the authors.)