Seminar on aliens ponders beginnings of life
View(s):A seminar titled An Encounter with Aliens from Stone Age to Space Age was held at Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) with the keynote speaker being Prof Chandra Wickremesinghe, recently.
Dr Locana Gunaratna introduced Prof Wickremesinghe, and after his speech a Q&A session followed.
Prof Wickremesinghe started off with the concept of the milky way saying that it must have been a common sight for the stone age man that must have prompted the question how we as humans place ourselves in the milky way. It was found that the Stone Age man represented the milky way in works of art such as cave paintings.
Our distant ancestor also must have thought about aliens and must have also asked the question ‘are we alone in the universe’.
Prof Wickremesinghe touched on the first life forms on the planet which came in the form of crystals of Zychonium some 4.2 billion years ago. He mentioned that showers of asteroids probably hit the earth’s surface which carried the first life on earth.
Prof Wickremesinghe then inverted the billion years into a hundred years and stated that the single celled bacteria first came about 75 years, towering plants some 3 years ago and the dinosaurs some 6 years ago. After their extinction from the comet strike homoerectus came some 2 weeks ago and the homosapiens came some 18 hours ago.
He also said that there were two schools of thought on how life entered the world.
The two schools included life coming spontaneously and suddenly and the other being that life started from non-life with life being a cosmic thing with life being eternally present in cosmos, where ever and whenever they chose.
The earth centered biology came from the works of the great Philosopher Aristotle. The idea that life came from non-life dominated western thought for over 2,000 years and was greatly assisted from the rise of Christianity and by papal decrees from religious leaders like St Thomas Aquinas.
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