by: Yuriy Diakunchak
Life on earth may have come from outerspace according to a Ukrainian scientist. If you have trouble dealing with that, you should probably stop reading just about here and commence with the last paragraph of this piece. If you can handle finding out that humanity might very well be the scum scraped off of some other being's left shoe, read on.
A Ukrainian scientist, A.V. Arkhipov from the Institute of Radio Astronomy, writes in the June 1996 edition of The Observatory: A Review of Astronomy, a journal published in London, that he believes life on earth may have sprung from extraterrestrial flotsam. Proponents of this theory on how humanity got its start, were quite excited last year when a piece of rock that dropped in from Mars showed signs of containing organic matter. Though there is as yet no proof that the traces found in the rock were actually organic, the incident illustrates how the building blocks of life could travel from one place to another. By this reasoning, someone or something could have tossed the remains of its lunch out through the air lock on a space ship billions of years ago, indirectly giving rise to the human race. Life could have started when the remains of a half-chicken combo with fries landed on our then barren planet.
Arkhipov's, formula has lots of sigmas, rhos and mus in it, so its got to be right, right? But before you start looking for progenitors in the heavens above, remember it's only a theory. According to Toronto scientist Ivan Semeniuk (see Spaced Out With Ivan Semeniuk) this theory has been floating around for years, and doesn't really add anything conclusive to the search for the origins of life. All the theory does is change the location of Eden rather than help explain how life arose in the first place. Semeniuk counsels that we look for clues to the beginnings of life right here on earth rather than gallivant through the universe looking for someone else's trash heaps. Arkhipov is bound to disagree.