Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- 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
- n. Same as panspermatism.
Wiktionary
- n. The hypothesis that microorganisms may transmit life from outer space to habitable bodies; or the process of such transmission.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The doctrine of the widespread distribution of germs, from which under favorable circumstances bacteria, vibrios, etc., may develop.
- n. The doctrine that all organisms must come from living parents; biogenesis; -- the opposite of
spontaneous generation . - 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
- 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.”
“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.”
“If Hoover's claims are true, his findings will support a theory called "panspermia.”
“You could have read it as a nod to the idea of panspermia, but to me it smacked of intelligent design and creationism.”
“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).”
“Scientists have speculated that life could have come to Earth from space - a notion called panspermia - since the”
“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.”
“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.”
“This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.”
“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.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘panspermia’.
-
Not edible
Things that sound edible but are not (usually). See Liberty's To Eat, or Not to Eat? for more diet food.
cinnabar, dulcimer, belfries, potto, maltha, grapple, loam, rake, tort, pomade, buffalo chip, wedgie and 172 more...
-
science fact or fiction
pretty open-ended here—terms, ideas, lingo, technologies and phenomena (real or postulated) that are, were, should be or could be used in speculative fiction
tachyon, mecha, dropship, wetware, meatspace, nanobot, cloned meat, asteroid mining, hyperdrive, wormhole, parallel universe, distributed intel... and 464 more...
-
Originventory
Beformitables; previousness, past-referents, and origins.
erstwhile, formication, quondam, atavistic, umquhile, yestreen, hesternal, hesternopothia, pridian, ere, retrophilia, ante mortem and 72 more...
-
It means what?
Definitions you'd never surmise from their spelling.
vexillologist, biocide, earworm, moon carrots, logorrhea, uberous, unguiculate, uropoietic, reciprocornous, recrudescence, rectrix, succorrhoea and 39 more...
-
Cosmic
Relating to sci-fi or outer space.
xenophobia, tellurian, terrene, cislunar, ectoplasm, ufology, recalesce, panspermia, jetavator, siderism, exocide, sabaism and 10 more...
-
Dirty Words?
flange, shunt, dictum, angina, cunctator, mastication, spelunker, shiitake, rimshot, arsole, forebulge, fecund and 34 more...
-
marginalia
exuberance, potsherds, earthbound, marcher, märchen, pastiche, transliterated, crocodile, oxbridge, jejune, publican, antithesis and 143 more...
-
hildjj's Words
bookmarklet, demisemiquaver, zeitgeist, hermeneutics, oligarch, quisling, absinthe, mellifluent, verisimilitude, implacable, necrotic, nacreous and 243 more...
-
Logodaedalus' Lexical Locutionary
Discombobulating the illiterate since the middle of the last century.
adiaphora, agitprop, alliteration, apophthegm, autarky, bête noire, bezoar, biorhythm, braggadocio, canaille, confabulate, confrère and 332 more...
-
AbraxasZugzwang's Words
atavism, abraxas, sisyphean, frust, fetus-in-fetu, arhythmically, queef, epidemiology, abecedarian, troglodyte, chiaroscuro, philology and 631 more...
-
oldecat's Words
noncommutative, morphodynamics, ferrywoman, circumcircle, acceleration, inactivity, biodiesel, corrosion, quadrilogy, imprimitivity, normalizer, teleosemantics and 240 more...
-
biologic
protoplasm, microchimerism, organelle, panspermia, housekeeping gene, double crossover, incomplete dominance, bacteriophage, connectomics, antigenic drift, inoculation, punctuated equili... and 138 more...
-
Biology
malacological, cladistic, phenetic, phylogenetic, taxonomy, bathypelagic, superfamily, superorder, infraorder, binomen, binominal, quorum sensing and 199 more...
-
word set8
dolmen, cairn, penetralia, dovetailed, draftsmanship, gestalt, dingbat, tenebrosity, squash racquets, dogleg, prurience, deflowering and 68 more...
-
Papa
P
preternatural, paean, pastiche, picaresque, proclivity, plenilune, phlox, praxis, phoneme, profligate, periphrastic, panspermia and 67 more...
-
the urban planner
Large-scale humanity. From small settlements, to nations, to regions within a larger region.
confederacy, federation, republic, kingdom, emirate, fief, monarchy, sovereignty, realm, principality, domain, oligarchy and 25 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for panspermia.
tbtabby Used in Dinosaur Comics. Aug 18, 2009
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