Scientists discovered that cosmic rays had more influence on trees rather than climate change. BBC Earth reported in an article the surprising discovery that there is a cosmic influence to tree growth. The author said, “When the intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s surface was higher, the rate of tree growth was faster”.
Cosmic rays are particles in the universe which hit the surface of the Earth. However, their intensity varies with solar activity. During the heightened activity, there are more sunspots on the surface of the sun, which create a strong magnetic field. The field absorbs the cosmic rays to a certain extent.
Cosmic rays are not the only connection between the forest and the universe.
Now think of our solar system as one big spaceship. The nine planets and its surroundings are indeed in a kind of bubble travelling through space. Space is a vacuum, but it isn’t empty. There are cosmic rays. There are other stars and planets, black holes, rogue planets, and somewhere there is dark matter. Space is anything but a lifeless place. There might be intelligent clouds, alien civilisations, but also entities which are beyond our imagination.
What if Earth attracted on its endless journey through the vastness of our universe a cosmic hitch-hiker? It might be something, which was lurking somewhere in the depth of space. What if it landed in some remote forested area a long time ago? Perhaps it is still there. “He who walks behind” doesn’t show his face, but he is here. Right now.
We should also be aware that any point on the surface of Earth and other places in the solar system could be in connection with the universe. If we look at Astrology in a metaphorical sense, we get the right picture.
The cosmic-hitchhiker surprisingly gets some credibility through science. The mystery of the genesis of life remains unsolved. The most common idea is the microbial-hitchhiker sitting on some comet or some other cosmic driftwood. We know that microbes can survive journeys of millions of years in space. Some day the asteroid hits a planet. The asteroid survives the impact. The seed of life in a primordial world is the microbes on the surface of the asteroid. That’s also called the “Panspermia theory”. The theory means that life on Earth may have seeded here from other worlds. The transportation happened via microbial contamination of solid objects like asteroids.
The earliest forms of life on Earth are 3.48 billion years old. These are fossils found in Western Australia. There is no proof for any extraterrestrial origin but at this time Earth was very young. The young solar system was chaos with a constant bombardment of cosmic debris on the surface of the young Earth. There is also a prominent theory suggesting that life comes from Mars.
The unsolved riddle of the creation of life on Earth brought up even more fascinating ideas: What if there was some extraterrestrial civilisation “seeding” planet Earth? This is the idea of the “Engineers” as seen in the Alien Franchise by Ridley Scott. Okay, this is science-fiction but is it too fantastic or could it be real?
Recently Kelsey Johnson wrote in a Scientific American article about “No E.T. Life Yet – That might be a warning” that “ridiculously crazy and complex ideas are sometimes correct”. “Just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a serious academic study”. The article is mostly about why we haven’t found extraterrestrial life yet and that we shouldn’t draw simple conclusions. It says that humans are “cosmic babies” considering the age of the universe. “E.T. life is likely to be millions of years more technologically advanced than we are”.
There is another problem connected with the unsolved questions about the origins and the creation of life. That is our limited view of what life is. There might be other forms of life, which are different from any idea we have. If this is the case, we should not only watch the skies. Perhaps we are sharing our spaceship Earth with other cosmic-hitchhikers, with somebody accompanying us from the very beginning.
