Transcript of the Presentation given by Francis A. Andrew to the pupils of the Indian School, Nizwa on January 21st 2013.

( Also contains some exciting breaking news ). I thank Mr. Atanu Roy and Mr. Joseph Chako for their very nice introduction and for inviting me to address the pupils of the Indian School in Nizwa. I am singularly honoured and privileged to stand before you all this morning. As Mr. Joseph said in his introduction, I have written a number of books, most of which are in the science fiction genre. As the time parameters pertaining to this presentation would not permit of a detailed description of each of these on an item by item basis, we would do well to approach this presentation within the framework of any common thread that may be running through these novels. It is with this consideration in mind that the relatively new discipline of Astrobiology becomes, most undoubtedly, the discernable theme in my science fiction works. Perhaps most of you, if not all of you, know what Astrobiology is; in case not, I shall describe it a little later on in the talk. The late Sir Fred Hoyles works were the most important inspiration for me regarding my own science fiction novels and my interest in astronomy in general. Sir Fred Hoyle consistently argued that the compartmentalisation to which academia subjects the sciences is purely artificial. Instead, he argued, Nature does not provide the basis for any mutual exclusion among the sciences but rather interlinks and overlaps them in a bewildering variety of ways. And here I come to explain what Astrobiology actually is. Now you have all heard of Astronomy, and of course you all know what Biology is; put the two disciplines together and you have Astrobiology. Where then did Astrobiology come from? It was devised by Sir Fred Hoyle and his colleague, Professor Nadine Chandra Wickramasinghe, back in the 1970s. It behooves us to consider how the existence of this subject came about. For over twenty years, Sir Fred Hoyle and Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe, grappled with the issue as to the composition and nature of interstellar dust. In our galaxy there are about 100 billion stars in fact some astronomers place the estimation as being more in the region of around 300 billion. We tend to think of the vast distances between the stars as being completely empty space; in fact between the stars, there are vast quantities of gas and dust. Astronomers have known this since around the middle of the 19th century; however, what has constantly puzzled them is to what exactly that dust is made of. The original theory concerning interstellar dust was that it was composed of ice grains. However, it soon came to be recognised that there were two fundamental flaws in this model: first of all, in the low pressure of interstellar space, water would evaporate quickly unable to exist in either liquid or solid form. Secondly, with the improvements in spectroscopy, it was found that the spectra of the dust clouds did not match those for ice grains. So the ice grain model as an explanation for interstellar dust had to be abandoned.

What appeared to fit the spectra better was graphite; so graphite was considered as being the substance out of which interstellar dust was composed. However, with further improvements in spectroscopic techniques and equipment ( especially where spectrograms were obtained from devices carried beyond the Earths atmosphere ), the graphite model had to undergo some modification. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it was soon realised that more complex chemistry was going on in interstellar gas and dust than had ever been hitherto imagined. Complex organic molecules were discovered organic polymers, polysaccharides and even amino acids were detected in interstellar space. To date around 200 organic compounds are now known to exist in the dust and gas clouds of interstellar space. Yet, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe remained unconvinced that even organic compounds were a wholly sufficient explanation to account for the composition of interstellar dust. They obtained laboratory spectra of bacteria and when they compared it to the spectra of the interstellar gas and dust clouds, they found an almost perfect match. In a book published in 1979 entitled Diseases from Space, the two scientists made the controversial claim that interstellar dust was composed of desiccated bacteria. Mainstream science ridiculed and dismissed the theory at the time, but as the tally of organic compounds being found in interstellar space began to go up, the theory started to take on more credibility. We next want to look at other types of evidence that Sir Fred Hoyle and Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe used in the justification of their new theory. Well, if the Universe is so full of bacteria, then it must have some effect upon the Earth if it should ever manage to penetrate our planets atmosphere. So then, what happens when we come into contact with bacteria or viruses? Of course we get sick and in some cases even die. What the two scientists did however, was to challenge the commonly accepted mode of how diseases are spread i.e. from human to human. They examined the incidences of sickness in places of communal living mainly boarding schools and checked the pattern of sickness during influenza outbreaks. Now, as you know, the dormitories in a boarding school are placed in various different locations around the school grounds. If the process of transmission is from person to person, then when one pupil gets sick in one dormitory, the influenza virus should pass in linear fashion all the way down the dormitory corridor until every pupil in the dormitory gets sick. This means that the whole dormitory will get sick en masse and report sick on the same day and more or less at the same time. However, what Hoyle and Wickramasinghe found was something quite different. They found that the times and dates when pupils reported sick was sporadic and in no way corresponded to the expected pattern if the mechanism for the spread of the disease were by human to human transmission.

The two scientists next turned their attention to the outbreak of the Spanish flu of 1918. As you all probably know, this influenza pandemic killed millions of people throughout the world. They discovered in historic/epidemiological researches that the outbreak of this flu occurred simultaneously in New York and Bombay. Now bear in mind that in 1918 aviation was still in its infancy and there was no international air travel. It was also noted that the epidemic did not affect Boston, which is close to New York, until three weeks later and yet there was a limited amount of air travel between the two cities. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also examined the spread of the flu virus in Alaska. As Im sure you all know, Alaska is the largest state in the American Union. It is a vast territory covering an area of nearly 664,000 square miles, yet the disease spread rapidly throughout Alaska reaching communities well ahead of visits from medical personnel. There are also instances of people such as shepherds who abide in remote places and go for weeks without any human contact coming down with flu viruses. Yet there can be cases whereby some members of a family become infected while others remain free of the disease in spite of their living in close proximity to one another. These examples clearly indicate that it is very difficult to account for the spread of the virus in terms of human to human transmission processes. So, sickness and disease are the effects that bacteria is now having on the Earth but what about the past? Hoyle and Wickramasinghe looked at what impact extraterrestrial bacteria might have had on the evolutionary process. You are all no doubt familiar with the theory of evolution as postulated by Charles Darwin. Darwin explained evolution in terms of species change occurring in gradual incremental steps over millions and billions of years. If this were the mechanism for evolution, we would expect to find millions of intermediate species between the main-line species. Unfortunately, the fossil record does not bear this out. There were no intermediate species found in Darwins day and there are no intermediate species prevalent in the fossil layers today 154 years after the publication of Origin of Species. The fossil record provides no evidence for the myriad of intermediate species that should exist if the Darwinian form of evolution were the right one. The missing links are still missing! What the fossil record does show though, is the sudden extinction of species and the sudden emergence of others. The question then is as to what exactly the mechanism is for this phenomenon. According to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, it is incoming pathogens arriving from outer space. These pathogens will cause massive terrestrial pandemics which will result in the extermination of species. However, some stronger and hardier animals will be able to overcome the diseases; not only will they survive but they will take advantage of the new genetic material from outer space and incorporate it into their own DNA they will then quickly move up to the next rung in the ladder of evolution and so constitute the next mainline species. One of the mechanisms argued to account for the Darwinian form of evolution has been that of genetic mutation. Most mutations are detrimental to the human species and cause such defects as Downs Syndrome, but some mutations may be beneficial. While beneficial

mutations is a valid way of looking at the evolutionary process, it can only explain what is generally termed micro-evolution minor adaptive changes within the same species. However, beneficial mutations cannot explain macro-evolutionary processes. Why is this you might ask? Let us use the lego set as an analogy: as you know, you can use the rubber pieces of the lego set to make all kinds of contraptions from simple to sophisticated. But no matter how intricately designed your lego art may be, your creations will never move, fly or swim in any sort of unassisted mechanical way. If you desired motion from your lego designs, you would have to introduce something outside of the lego set you would require some sort of metallic engine in order to achieve locomotion. So it is the same with mutational based evolution; it will produce many varieties within the same species but will not create new species. This will require an input of new genetic material and logically that can only come from extraterrestrial sources. Confirmation that biological activity exists outside of the Earth would require from the human mind nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way we currently understand the Universe. Instead of studying the Universe only in terms of physics, astrophysics, chemistry and mechanics, it would be necessary for astronomers to give biology a much more important place in their endeavours to explain the nature of the cosmos, for life could no longer be considered as being something peripheral to the cosmological scheme of things but rather as a phenomenon interwoven into the very fabric and structure of the Universe. It will be necessary to understand the Universe as essentially a biological entity where life is not thought of as some marginal event but rather as having the prominent place as the very soul of the vast cosmos itself. Breaking News.

Since I prepared the talk I have just delivered to you, there have been some exciting new developments in the area of Astrobiology and I want the Indian School in Nizwa to be the first in Oman to hear about it. Professor N. Chandra Wichramasinghe et al, in the Journal of Astrobiology, ( January 10th & 13th ) related that a cometary fragment in the form of a meteorite created a fireball in the sky over the town of Pollonaruwa in Sri Lanka. This amazing phenomenon caused red rain to fall. If there are any Keralans among you, you will probably remember that Kerala experienced the same phenomenon back in 2009. When some samples of the red rain from Pollonaruwa were examined at the Medical Research Institute ( MRI ) in Colombo, they were found to contain biological cells. Studies of the meteorite fragments revealed structures morphologically similar to the cells in the red rain. Even more exciting was the discovery of not only fossilised diatoms but actual living ones. If this is confirmed in the near future, mainstream science has no choice but to take Astrobiology in from the cold! While what appears to be fossilised

bacterial spores have been found in various extraterrestrial geological fragments such as the Murchison Meteorite and the Mars Rock - this is the first time that viable biological specimens have been recovered from a rock of meteoric origin. As you will probably know from your biology classes here, diatoms are of the phytoplankton class of which seaweed is a typical example.