Hi Bill Gill,
I tend to agree with you , but with reservations.
I always admired Prof: Gold since I first read about his unusual theory's over 40 years ago.
Pandemics caused by Panspermia does not nessesarily mean that Microbiological or germ life has developed upon some other planet, and survived for some thousands of years, prehaps millions, out there in the Cold, U-Violet, Vacuum of space.......before being swept up by the gravitational attraction of our Earth.
Panspermia in that sense, has not been proven and prehaps never will.
NASA attached Aerogel Jelly to the 'Stardust Space Capsule' about 6 years ago, and had us all looking thru bits of digitised microscopic jelly for dust particles on our 'puters.
I know, I was one of the volunteers at the time. plenty of space dust particles were recorded, but (and this is the point) no life microbes germs or similar, as far as I am aware...were found.
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.htmlNevertheless even 40 years ago I wondered whether Bacteria
and/or Spores, could be ejected into space by one of our volcanoes, say Vesuvius?
Then more than ten years ago I read that bits of Mars were being found lying on the snow and ice in Antartica. Wow, how do they know they are from Mars?
http://cmex.ihmc.us/data/marslife/SNC/index.htmAgain there is no absolute proof that those meteorites contained life.
But wait.
Recently NASA scientists have proven that some Microbes can and do, survive in space for hundreds-of-thousands of years.
In a unique experiment on a galactic scale, millions of bacterial spores have been purposely exposed to space, to see how solar radiation affects them and the results supported the idea that not only could life have arrived on Earth on meteorites, but that considerable material has flowed between planets.
Recently, an international team of researchers, led by Gerda Horneck of the Institute of Aerospace Medicine in Cologne, Germany. In early experiments, Horneck and her colleagues used the Russian Foton satellite to expose 50 million unprotected spores of the bacterium Bacillus Subtilis outside the satellite.
UV radiation from the Sun killed nearly all of the spores, and did so even when the spores were confined under quartz.
But nevertheless Horneck and her colleages thought that meteorites might protect Bacteria on their journey through Space.
They mixed samples of 50 million spores with particles of clay, red sandstone, Martian meteorite, or simulated Martian soil and made small lumps a centimeter in diameter.
Between 10,000 and 100,000 spores of the original 50 million survived and when mixed with red sandstone, nearly all survived, suggesting that even meteorites a
centimeter in diameter can carry life from one planet to another, if they completed the journey within a few years. In a rock a meter across, bacteria could probably survive for millions of years.
So maybe we have got it all wrong.......Prehaps it is US, or at least our Volcanoes that have been delivering OUR EARTH life, in the form of Spores, dna, and Microbes to the rest of the Universe.
By shooting stones, grit, and dust out into space.