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  1. panspermia love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. The theory that microorganisms or biochemical compounds from outer space are responsible for originating life on Earth and possibly in other parts of the universe where suitable atmospheric conditions exist.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. Same as panspermatism.

Wiktionary

  1. n. The hypothesis that microorganisms may transmit life from outer space to habitable bodies; or the process of such transmission.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. The doctrine of the widespread distribution of germs, from which under favorable circumstances bacteria, vibrios, etc., may develop.
  2. n. The doctrine that all organisms must come from living parents; biogenesis; -- the opposite of spontaneous generation.
  3. n. The theory that life on earth originated from spores or germs that evolved elsewhere in the uiniverse; -- in contradistinction to the theory that life evolved on earth from inanimate matter. This theory, originally suggested by S. Arrhenius in 1907, is sometimes advanced by those who feel that the time required for evolution of life is too long for life to have evolved on Earth from inanimate matter.

Etymologies

  1. Greek panspermiā, mixture of all seeds : pan-, pan- + sperma, seed; see sperm1. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “Keep in mind that "directed panspermia" is based on the idea that life will arise some place by natural means, then disperse from there.”

    Abiogenesis and Evolution

  • “I love this article in which Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe says that life was brought here to Earth by comets, a theory he jointly proposed called panspermia in which interstellar dust is partly organic in nature and in comets.”

    Archive 2010-02-01

  • “If Hoover's claims are true, his findings will support a theory called "panspermia.”

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

  • “You could have read it as a nod to the idea of panspermia, but to me it smacked of intelligent design and creationism.”

    msnbc.com: Top msnbc.com headlines

  • “To test this theory - called panspermia - Ruvkun and his colleagues have started a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG, as a play on SETI).”

    Space News From SpaceDaily.Com

  • “Scientists have speculated that life could have come to Earth from space - a notion called panspermia - since the”

    Wired Top Stories

  • “The fact that living organisms do survive in open space seems to support the idea of panspermia - life spreading from planet to another, or even between solar systems.”

    PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories

  • “A few scientists support the idea of panspermia ( "all seed"), according to which life exist all over the universe, or the more moderate concept of exogenesis ( "outside origin") where life on Earth originated elsewhere, maybe in the form of extraterrestrial microbes brought here with meteorites.”

    The Brussels Journal - The Voice of Conservatism in Europe

  • “This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.”

    msnbc.com: Top msnbc.com headlines

  • “This is true even if the so-called "panspermia" theory holds and both Earth and Mars may have been originally "seeded" by similar microorganisms or one planet may have been seeded by the other.”

    Posthuman Blues

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Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘panspermia’.

Comments

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  • bilby Brilliant, gangerh. Jul 6, 2008

  • gangerh Peter Panspermia. The hypothesis that life never quite grows up on Earth and eventually peters out. Jul 6, 2008

  • Prolagus A kind of bread I don't want to try. Jul 6, 2008

  • bilby Fertility clinic. Jul 6, 2008

  • Prolagus A theory that radically changes the question from "how did life begin?" to "how did life begin?". Jul 6, 2008

  • mercy An awesome word and theory. Jul 6, 2008

  • whichbe The hypothesis that life on Earth originated from microorganisms from outer space. (Wiktionary) Jul 6, 2008

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‘panspermia’ has been looked up 1544 times, loved by 4 people, added to 23 lists, commented on 8 times, and has a Scrabble score of 16.