The 2012 film “Prometheus” offers up an interesting theory of how life evolved on Earth. The science fiction thriller explores the idea that beings from another planet purposely seeded life on our planet. The movie is very much science fiction but it is based on a scientific theory called directed panspermia.
Directed panspermia received more attention than it might have except for one of the people proposing it. Francis Crick was a scientist made famous for his co-discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, for which Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962. Crick and fellow scientist Leslie Orgel posited that life on Earth could have begun as a design by space-traveling aliens.
While that fanciful theory did not gain much traction, the idea that life began elsewhere in the universe made the news recently when a group of scientists suggested octopuses may be a life form from outer space. Although that idea was immediately shouted down by the majority of scientists, it was a serious suggestion in a paper published in the science journal “Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.”
Mainstream science tells us the octopus evolved from nautiloids, a group of animals that first evolved millions of years ago known as cephalopods. Today’s cephalopods include octopus, squid and nautilus. Problem is, the octopus is very different from its alleged ancestor. The octopus is well known for its intelligence, with a complex nervous system missing in the nautilus.
The idea that the octopus originated on a different planet is not one of directed panspermia but generalized panspermia. That is still far from mainstream but it is not as controversial as directed panspermia. The idea put forth in the paper is that octopus eggs might have gotten trapped and frozen inside a meteor that crashed into Earth millions of years ago.
That may seem like a strange theory but then the octopus is a strange and wondrous animal whose origins are in dispute.
