This preprint truly hurt my head.

It's a bit bizarre - here is the abstract:

Abstract said:

The origin of life and the origin of the universe are among the most important problems of science and they might be inextricably linked.  Hydro-gravitational-dynamics (HGD) cosmology predicts hydrogen-helium gas planets in clumps as the dark matter of galaxies, with millions of planets per star.  This unexpected prediction is supported by quasar microlensing of a galaxy and a flood of new data from space telescopes.  Supernovae from stellar over-accretion of planets produce the chemicals (C, N, O, P etc.) and abundant liquid water domains required for first life and the means for wide scattering of life prototypes.  The first life likely occurred promptly following the plasma to gas transition 300,000 years after the big bang while the planets were still warm, and interchanges of material between planets constituted essentially a cosmological primordial soup.  Images from optical, radio, and infrared space telescopes suggest life on Earth was neither first nor inevitable.

HGD, as far as I can tell, is yet another competitor to λCDM with a Big Bang framework from some sort of fluid dynamics perspective. Gibson wrote a paper about it and got it published in the Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics. (Here is that paper)

I'm not opposed to panspermia as a concept, but I certainly object to Hoyle's characterizations of how life beginning on Earth de novo was - in his estimation - statistically impossible. From his writings and interviews, it has that faulty "everything had to come together at once" and "enzymes have to be 100% exact" thinking that I would have expected from proponents of creation science. Indeed, they have been quoting Hoyle on the subject ever since.

This paper repeats that statistical idiocy:

Preprint said:

By ΛCDMHC, (the standard cosmological model) it is highly improbable that life could be widely transferred in the cosmos, and impossible for life to begin. The extreme complexity of the simplest living microorganism suggests spontaneous creation (abiogenesis) is impossible without templates.

It's no surprise, in retrospect, that Wickramasinghe - Hoyle's partner in panspermia crime - is involved.

It's not impossible that life was seeded from elsewhere, but it's pretty likely that it simply formed here. The 'strong panspermia' proponents' objections to the latter border on the insane (seriously - life needed boosts in complexity from extraterrestrial templates??)

It's a fun read, anyhow. Millions of planets that accrete into supernovae. Dark matter isn't missing: it's planets. Frozen planets are evaporated by plasma beams. It cries out for video :)

They also have a more "cleaned up for the scientific community" paper here.

Learn some biology, NCW - maybe a decent amount about lipids, comparative genomics, ribozymes, neutral mutations, degenerate (i.e. redundant) coding, ctenophores, biofilms, ease of forming purines and pyrimidines, the cycle of diversity and narrowing after biological innovations, and just how old things like hemoglobins, opsins, ubiquitin and cytochrome C are before handwaving away the possibilities of life starting - and evolving all the way to modern creatures - right here without special external help.

That's the old "If things were different, they wouldn't be the same." argument. I once had a discussion along those lines with a religious woman who came knocking on the door. In response, I picked up a handful of pea gravel and scattered it on the porch. Then I asked her, "If I carefully marked the location of each piece of gravel, then picked them all up and scattered them again, how many attempts do you suppose it would take me to get them each to land in exactly the same spot as the original toss? Does the fact that I created a reality that I can't reproduce make it supernatural or impossible? You know it's not impossible. You just watched it happen."

The scientific version is that conditions had to be "just perfect" for life on Earth to exist as it does. The reality is that life on Earth exists as it does because of the conditions. The former assumed that our current situation is the planned end result of something. Who says it's perfect? I think the solar system would be just as happy or indifferent whether life existed on Earth or not.

I don't know if life on Earth originated on Earth or not. But I do like the theory that we are gaining not only material, but genetic material from space, in the form of viruses and other micro-organisms. They may not have been the seeds of life here, but they may help influence its development. Given the discovery of so many extremophiles and the discovery that, contrary to prior belief, the universe is soaking wet (relatively speaking), I don't think the existence of life forms and/or genetic material, pervasive in the dust and debris of the universe is that far fetched.

If I recall correctly, Hoyle's objection to life originating on Earth was that the micro minerals necessary for life are too dilute in sea water for everything to come together at once. But there are tidal pools where sea water is mixed with mineral runoff from the land and everything is concentrated by evaporation so the ideal primordial soup may have been cooked up on land rather than in the open sea. Mica crystals in the soil or sea bed may have served as templates for the first self replicating chemicals.  Weathered mica crystals look something like a book that has been left out in the rain and they have a lot of surface area where organic chemicals and minerals can arrange themselves over a long period of time on an undisturbed surface.

Eduffy80911 said:

The scientific version is that conditions had to be "just perfect" for life on Earth to exist as it does.

I would take issue with that, actually. If that were the case, we would not have looked outside the solar system, or done experiments of the like that determined that ice can also concentrate organic solutes.

Eduffy80911 said:

I don't know if life on Earth originated on Earth or not. But I do like the theory that we are gaining not only material, but genetic material from space, in the form of viruses and other micro-organisms. They may not have been the seeds of life here, but they may help influence its development. Given the discovery of so many extremophiles and the discovery that, contrary to prior belief, the universe is soaking wet (relatively speaking), I don't think the existence of life forms and/or genetic material, pervasive in the dust and debris of the universe is that far fetched.

I've seen such things espoused by panspermia proponents, but they do not make very much sense, especially the parts of the hypotheses that indicates that everything is due to 'templates' of some sort, organisms like viruses forming for some reason without anything like life cycles or hosts. It's goofy, and needs to be justified with something stronger than "well, the molecules could survive". Something like catching oodles of viruses in an aerogel experiment or finding areas in DNA comparisons where these 'evolution-helper organisms' could be caught in the act.

bangstrom said:

Weathered mica crystals look something like a book that has been left out in the rain and they have a lot of surface area where organic chemicals and minerals can arrange themselves over a long period of time on an undisturbed surface.

Montmorillonite is another favourite, though I've also heard that smokers and fissures are other favourites to allow the requisite concentrations for life processes.