Is Flu Alien? Do We Get Sick From Space?

by Leigh
With flu season approaching again some scientists think the impending viral invasion may originate in space. The seeds of this idea, a concept called panspermia, have been around since Anaxagoras, a philosopher who lived in the 5th century B.C.. More recently, prominent British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) put forward the possibility that viruses first came to Earth from the tails of comets passing close-by to our planet during a Royal Institution lecture in 1982. Hoyle worked with fellow astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe on the theory that it was statistically improbable that life on earth grew out of chemical evolution alone. In their book Evolution From Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism, published in 1984, the duo hypothesized that the seeds of life first came to the Earth from space. They claimed that complex life evolved from these scattered seeds of primitive DNA, and that evolution continues to be driven by new influxes of organic matter (such as viruses) from space.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 that killed tens of millions of people, many of whom were in their prime, was one catastrophic event that some supporters of panspermia cite as evidence. Even the Inuit of the remote polar regions did not escape. It is unlikely that such isolated populations could have been infected by human contact, especially given the relatively short time frame in which mass global infection occurred, but they suffered infection nonetheless, adding weight to the theory that the infection was scattered from the heavens. Also, the younger victims, which died in significant numbers, tended to be outside more often than older people, and this could have made them more vulnerable to infection if the infective agents did indeed arrive from the sky, though theories that their more robust immune systems reacting against infection in a more lethal way are also put forward as a factor in the unusually large death rate amongst the young and otherwise fit.

At the exact time of the 1918 pandemic, there was no great comet observable. But that doesn't preclude the remnants of previous comets settling on earth over time, and could be one example of the Earth, and life upon it, being affected in a big way by extraterrestrial organic material.

But could viruses survive their journey through space? There are many examples of life enduring in extreme conditions, such as bacteria found under deep ice at the poles, or in high temperature environments around volcanic activity. Extremophile organisms like these have made scientists reconsider some long held views on the fragility of life and its abundance in the most unlikely of places. The Murchison meteorite, which fell to earth in Australia in 1969, was found to have amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and life, in it's core and complex molecules in interstellar space are said to have been detected.

Wickramasinghe expounded upon these ideas in a 2003 letter, which was published in The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals. In it the astronomer hypothesized that the SARS virus may have come from space, stating that, "A small amount of the culprit virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a first tentative fall out East of the great mountain range of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic deposits in neighboring areas."

New viruses appearing in the known biosphere may well be due to such causes, and some unidentified and possibly alien viruses may already be here, just pooled in other species, ready to jump to humanity.

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