Panspermia, Seeding the Universe with Life

Mar 6, 2010

We spend an hour with Ph. D Michael Noah Mautner, a research professor at the department of chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University. We recently came across an article on Pysorg.com titled, "We have a 'moral obligation' to seed universe with life" that featured an interview with Michael. So we invited him to speak further about his ideas and research about panspermia and the seeding of life on other planets. We are now technologically at a point where we have the ability to send microbial life from Earth to other worlds via space in order to perpetuate life. The question is if this is the right thing to do. If so, how would it be done? We also talk about the theory that life on Earth started in this way, someone else seeding life hear, millennia ago. Topics Discussed: panspermia, Lord Kelvin, Crick, self propagation, genetics, blue green algae, the question of origins of life, meteorites, Mars, Earth, "directed panspermia", rotifer eggs, launch cost, calculations, NASA, solar screen and more.