Right now, as you read this, you are immediately surrounded by 9000+ viruses every second

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Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

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Hoyle and Wickramasinghe developed the model of panspermia at the centre of the recent study. The new paper is a review of “the key experimental and observational data gathered over the past 60 years”, write the authors, “consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology”.

The H-W model holds, the authors state, “that life was seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (at or just before 4.1 billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells and organisms, … perhaps even fertilised ova and plant seeds, may have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth helping to drive further the progress of terrestrial biological evolution.”

In other words, the researchers suggest that abiogenesis did not happen on Earth and the main source of genetic novelty is not caused by the selection of naturally occurring advantageous mutations, but rather comes from a rain of extra-terrestrial living matter that integrates itself, via neo-Lamarckian mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer, into the genomes of terrestrial life.

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