Space Education and Strategic Applications Journal • Vol. 1, No. 1 • Spring / Summer 2020 Q & A with Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe By Melissa Layne would be remiss if I did not also in- clude in our inaugural issue an inter- I view with Chandra Wickramasinghe. Question 1 Layne: Professor Wickramasinghe, thank you for the opportunity for this interview. Do you believe person-to-person viral transmission occurs with Coronavirus or other viruses? If the infection comes from space, how do you account for the “close quarters” effect where infection rates run so much higher on cruise ships and such? Wickramasinghe: The new virus can of course be infective from person to person, but it seem that it is infective only on rel- atively close contact. The large clusters of cases occurring simultaneously on cruise ships, or in isolated communities, can be easily explained if clouds carrying the in- fective virus comes down in local regions. As for freak “superspreaders” being respon- sible for large clusters of cases, I think this is a myth based purely on ignorance. If a group of people were exposed to a cloud of virus and became simultaneously infected from such an environmental source, there would of course be a dispersion, or spread, in the times when the illness shows up. That is to say the incubation period would have statistical spread, so one case will always appear to be the first. To crown him/ her a title of superspreader, with mysterious power is akin to a medieval myth (ex- plained in my article). These ideas were first discussed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and me in two books— Diseases from Space (1979) and Evolution from Space (1980). Here, we introduced the theory that comets carry bacteria and viruses and that impacts by comets were important for both starting life on Earth and for its further evolution. The first point to make is that the standard view that life originates spontaneously on Earth in a primordial soup (or in deep-sea thermal vents) has no evidence whatsoever to sup- port it. Every experiment that has been done to demonstrate or test this possibility has ended in dismal failure over more than 50 years. The molecular complexity of life – the information content of life – is of an exceedingly specific kind and it is super-as- 27 doi: 10.18278/sesa.1.1.4 Space Education and Strategic Applications Journal tronomical in quantity, and so the origin of life could not have happened on Earth. A few years ago the very oldest evidence of microbial life on Earth was discovered in rocks dated 4200 million years ago – and this was at a time when the Earth was being relentlessly pounded by comet and asteroid impacts. So there is little doubt now that the first life on Earth came with impacting comets, and the subsequent evolution of life happened against the backdrop of new bacteria and viruses being introduced via comets, adding new potential and new genes for evolution. It is this potential for evolution with new cosmic genes against which Darwinian evolution takes place. So there is no doubt cosmic viruses are in our genes. And this is the reason that new viruses coming from space today can relate to evolved life forms like ourselves. Question 2 Layne: There is, to say the least, a lot of research and brain power being applied globally to Coronavirus. What are all those esteemed virologists missing in the data? Wickramasinghe: It is only relatively recently that scientists have been able to fully grasp the enormous magnitude of the microbial and viral content of the terrestrial biosphere. We now know that a typical liter of surface seawater contains at least 10 billion microbes as well as some 100 billion viruses—the vast majority of which re- main unidentified and characterized to date. Two years ago an international group of scientists collected bacteria and viruses that fell through the rarefied atmosphere near the 4000 meter peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain. They arrived at an astonishing tally of some 800 million viruses per square metre per day and an associated slightly smaller tally of bacteria – all of which would of course ultimately fall to the Earth’s surface. The assumption normally made is that all such viruses and bacteria necessarily originate on the Earth’s surface and are swept upwards in air currents. But in such a model many horrendous difficulties associated with the upward transport processes of bacteria and viruses are ignored. I think a significant fraction of this vast number of falling microbes must actually originate outside the terrestrial biosphere and come from cometary sources – viruses and bacteria that are expelled from comets. Further evidence comes from sampling the stratosphere for its bacterial and viral content. By sampling the stratosphere at a height of 41 km, using equipment carried using balloons already in 2002 we arrived at an estimated in-fall from this height of 20-200 million bacteria per square meter per day, and 10 to 100 times more viruses, falling downwards to the Earth. These are facts that cannot be ignored, but all too of- ten they are! So, if we take into account all the facts available to date we cannot avoid the conclusion that vast numbers of bacteria and viruses continue to fall through the Earth’s atmosphere, and it seems inevitable that a significant fraction is of external origin. 28 Q & A with Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe Question 3 Layne: How are comets and their debris stream meteor showers related to the hypothesis? Wickramasinghe: Of course comets have been regarded with fear and trepidation by many ancient cultures. Almost without exception comets have been thought to be bad omens – bringers of pestilence and death. The evidence for comets being impli- cated in the origin of life and also of diseases on Earth was intensely controversial when these ideas were first proposed in a scientific context by me in the 1970’s. Things have only changed a little since these early days. Now there is a growing consensus that comets are in some way connected to the origin of life. But most people are still fearful about going any further. But the facts alone tell us a different story. If one looks at all the available facts on epidemics throughout history, comets and epidemics appear to be causally linked. Stories of the sudden spread of plagues and pestilences punctuate human history throughout the millennia. The various epidemics, scattered through history and throughout the world often bear little or no resemblance one to another. But they share a common feature. They often affect entire cities, countries or even widely sep- arated parts of the Earth in a matter of days or weeks. The Greek Historian Thucydides describes one such epidemic—the plague of Athens of 429 BC thus: “It is said to have begun in that part of Ethiopia above Egypt .... On the city of Athens it fell suddenly, and first attacked the men in Pirae- us; so that it was even reported by them that the Peloponnesians had thrown poison into the cisterns ...” This event from Classical Greece bears striking similarities to the modern events re- lating to the outbreak of the Coronavirus in China. Thucydides writes that many families were simultaneously struck by a disease with a combination of symptoms hitherto unknown. The idea of an enemy (the Spartans) poisoning the drinking water rings true to what has happened in the Corona virus outbreak in China. Very similar descriptions of a sudden onset and rapid global spread is relevant to al- most all earlier as well as later epidemics. Extreme swiftness of transmission is hard to comprehend if, as is usually supposed, infection can pass only slowly from person to person or be carried by vectors such as lice and ticks, and more recently, monkeys, bats or snakes. Such explanations are particularly untenable for the many epidemics that occurred before the advent of air travel when movement of people across the Earth was a slow and tedious process. The general belief, that is by no means well-proven, is that major pandemics, such as influenza, start by random mutation or genetic recombination of a virus or bac- 29 Space Education and Strategic Applications Journal terium which then spreads across a susceptible population by direct person-to-per- son contact. If this is so, it is somewhat surprising that major pandemics tend to be relatively short-lived, usually lasting about a year, and that they do not eventually affect the entire human population, which would not have a specific immunity of any totally new pathogen. We might argue that a primary cometary dust infection is potentially the most lethal, and that secondary person-to-person transmissions have progressively reduced virulence resulting in a diminishing incidence of the disease over a limited period. Infections of a human population could occur directly by con- tact with “infected” meteoritic dust from an exploding cometary bolide, or indirectly by the original cometary infection passing first to rats, lice, primates, bats, snakes which can act as intermediaries. One important piece of historic evidence that emerged 101 years ago relates to the great Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 that caused some 20-30 million deaths worldwide. Reviewing all the available data Dr. L. Weinstein wrote as follows: “Although person-to-person spread occurred in local areas, the disease appeared on the same day in widely separated parts of the world on the one hand, but on the other, took days to weeks to spread relatively short distances. It was detected in Boston and Bombay on the same day, but took three weeks before it reached New York City, despite the fact that there was considerable travel between the two cities.