There are plenty of unusual theories over the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. From claims that the virus is a bioweapon, to the idea that 5G transmissions are behind the pandemic, there's been no shortage of hard-to-believe ideas.
But there's one COVID-19 theory so remarkable that it makes the others look boring by comparison: The proposal that the coronavirus came from space.
In this post, I'll discuss this wonderfully strange idea and its equally strange history.
The space virus theory has been the work of a group of researchers, notably Edward J. Steele and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe. This group has published ten papers on the topic since the pandemic began, but this paper from July 14th offers the most detailed argument.
Steele et al. suggest that COVID-19 arrived on a space rock, which was spotted as a bright fireball over the city of Songyuan in North East China on October 11, 2019.
They propose that the cosmic invader might have been "a fragile and loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of trillions of viruses/bacteria and other primary source cells."
The authors admit that the Songyuan fireball was spotted over 2,000 km northeast of Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, but they deal with this discrepancy with the hypothesis that a different fragment of the meteor arrived in the Wuhan area:
"A much larger original meteoroid could easily have been fragmenting and dispersing its contents before the ignition of the fireball event. A reasonable assumption is that the fireball which struck 2,000 km north of Wuhan may have been part of a wide tube of debris the bulk of which was deposited in the stratosphere to fall over Wuhan."
Needless to say, this is not a theory with any evidence for it. There is no evidence that viruses or bacteria (or any other life) exist in space, and Steele et al. provide no direct evidence that the coronavirus arrived from the heavens.
But it turns out that the theory of life (and disease) from space isn't new. The theory is called panspermia and a handful of researchers, including Steele and Wickramasinghe, have been advocating it for decades.
Panspermia is, broadly speaking, the idea that life arrived on earth from space, and continues to do. The notion goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but in its modern form it dates back to the 1970s and the work of two astronomers, Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
Hoyle was a renowned astronomer involved in many controversies over the course of his career. He is perhaps best known for coming up with the term "Big Bang" — although, unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, he never accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory. Wickramasinghe was Hoyle's doctoral student.
As they tell the story, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe conceived of panspermia while trying to explain the way in which interstellar dust absorbs light. They noticed that if the dust were composed of bacteria, this would produce the observed pattern of light absorption.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe eventually arrived at the idea of a galaxy absolutely full of microorganisms, present in comets and meteors as well as dust clouds.
