The Strange Theory of Coronavirus from Space

There are a great deal of unusual theories around the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus dependable for COVID-19. From statements that the virus is a bioweapon, to the strategy that 5G transmissions are behind the pandemic, you can find been no shortage of really hard-to-think suggestions.

But you can find one particular COVID-19 idea so amazing that it can make the other folks search boring by comparison: The proposal that the coronavirus came from room.

In this article, I am going to go over this incredibly unusual strategy and its equally unusual history.


The room virus idea has been the work of a group of scientists, notably Edward J. Steele and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe. This group has posted ten papers on the topic due to the fact the pandemic commenced, but this paper from July 14th provides the most thorough argument.

Steele et al. suggest that COVID-19 arrived on a meteor which was spotted as a dazzling fireball around the city of Songyuan in North East China on Oct eleven, 2019.

They suggest that the meteor may well have been “a fragile and loosely held carbonaceous meteorite carrying a cargo of trillions of viruses/microorganisms and other main resource cells.”

The authors acknowledge that the Songyuan meteor was spotted around 2,000 km northeast of Wuhan, where by the initial cases of COVID-19 were being reported, but they deal with this discrepancy with the hypothesis that a distinct fragment of the meteor arrived in the Wuhan location:

A substantially larger sized initial meteoroid could conveniently have been fragmenting and dispersing its contents right before the ignition of the fireball event. A sensible assumption is that the fireball which struck 2,000 km north of Wuhan may well have been component of a large tube of debris the bulk of which was deposited in the stratosphere to slide around Wuhan.

Useless to say, this is not a idea with any proof for it. There is no proof that viruses or microorganisms (or any other existence) exist in room, and Steele et al. deliver no immediate proof that the coronavirus arrived from the heavens.

But it turns out that the idea of existence (and disorder) from room just isn’t new. The idea is called panspermia and a handful of scientists, which includes Steele and Wickramasinghe, have been advocating it for many years.


Panspermia is, broadly talking, the strategy that existence arrived on earth from room, and proceeds to do. The notion goes all the way back to the historical Greeks, but in its modern day sort it dates back to the nineteen seventies and the work of two astronomers, Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe.

Hoyle was a renowned astronomer involved in several controversies around the training course of his vocation. He is perhaps very best recognized for coming up with the expression “Big Bang” — although, as opposed to the huge the vast majority of his colleagues, he hardly ever approved the validity of the Big Bang idea. Wickramasinghe was Hoyle’s doctoral pupil.

As they convey to the tale, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe conceived of panspermia while attempting to reveal the way in which interstellar dust absorbs light. They seen that if the dust were being composed of microorganisms, this would generate the observed pattern of light absorption.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe sooner or later arrived at the strategy of a galaxy definitely complete of microorganisms, current in comets and meteors as well as dust clouds.

panspermia - https://cosmology.com/Panspermia4.html

Diagram of “amplication loop for primordial microorganisms in the galaxy.” (Credit: Napier & Wickramasinghe 2010 Journal of Cosmology)

While organisms in deep room could not be alive for every se, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe believed that room microorganisms may well be equipped to reactivate if they arrived at a suited planet, like Earth — and perhaps infect the native creatures, human beings integrated.

All the way back in 1979, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe wrote of “Conditions from Place,” as the title of one particular of their books put it. They went on to suggest an interplanetary origin for numerous outbreaks, which includes the initial SARS in 2003 and influenza.


I obtain the strategy of a galaxy awash with existence intriguing. I you should not think it, and panspermia is turned down by the fantastic the vast majority of experts, but it was certainly a bold and artistic strategy. It may well not be fact, but at worst, it can be fantastic science fiction.

Nevertheless, the current attempts to reveal COVID-19 as coming from room strikes me as substantially fewer intriguing — and likely hazardous.

COVID-from-room is not an intriguing hypothesis. The idea is plainly just an attempt to make COVID-19 match into the existing panspermia model — you can find practically nothing new or artistic about that.

To be straightforward, even if you think in panspermia, I cannot see why you would consider that COVID-19 came from room. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is not some odd, alien pathogen. It can be very related to the initial SARS virus, and to numerous mammal coronaviruses, primarily bat ones. So even if you think in room viruses, this is one particular virus that plainly has an Earth origin.

COVID-from-room is also a hazardous hypothesis. Steele, Wickramasinghe et al. have proposed that COVID-19 is not contagious from human being to human being (or only hardly ever). Dependent on this perception, they proposed (in February) that COVID-19 would largely have an effect on China, and that it would disappear once the dust dispersed. They further wrote that there was no stage in hunting for a vaccine:

As a result, growth of a so called “COVID-19 vaccine” which is substantially in the information at the time of crafting would be a squander of general public tax-payer cash if mounted on the scale envisaged by governments and national centers for disorder management.

It can be clear that if everyone took this strategy severely, it would be quite hazardous to general public well being fortuitously, I you should not consider everyone does.

I would say, although, that the coronavirus-from-room idea is however a lot more plausible than some other theories of COVID-19. Believing that coronavirus is brought on by 5G transmissions, for instance, can make even fewer scientific feeling than believing it arrived on a meteor. A meteor could, in idea, have a virus, but radio waves cannot.