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It was Professor Thomas Gold's belief that Pandemics were caused by our Earth collecting germs from outer space.
Since people in all continents became ill, all at the same time. Far quicker than the Germ could be spread by aircraft flights.

Some more of my almost completely uninformed opinion. I have serious doubts about the panspermia theory, which would include Gold's belief. One of my concerns is the quantity of germs that we would collect. The start of the theory requires that life develop on some other planet, probably of another star. Then it has to somehow get ejected from that planet and survive for at a minimum thousands, more likely millions, of years in interstellar space. Then the probably rather small collection, measuring in my opinion at most a a few billion, has to stay together until it is caught in the gravitational field of another star and then finally hits the Earths atmosphere. Considering how thin the interstellar atmosphere it I doubt that they could stay together, and there is some question about their surviving the cold and vacuum and possible radiation. Particularly as it enters a solar system it would be exposed to the radiation from the sun, which could be rather extreme. So in my opinion the odds against any form of life coming to us from space are extremely long.

Bill Gill

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.html

Nevertheless 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.htm

Again 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.

meteorites a centimeter in diameter can carry life from one planet to another, if they completed the journey within a few years.

"God did it".