In the 2012 film Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott, researchers Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway find a star chart painted on a cave wall in Scotland that resembles others from previous ancient societies. They take these paintings to be an open invitation to come and visit from humanity's forefathers, the "Engineers."
The film begins with an extraterrestrial 'Engineer' preparing to seed a primordial planet with life, most likely Earth. He does this by consuming a black goop that causes him to disintegrate at the cellular level. It’s a striking theatrical image, but it makes you question whether this is the ideal way for this technologically sophisticated society to give genetic material to a planet. Seeding planets with DNA is referred to as panspermia if its unintended and directed panspermia if it is. Aliens traveling to a planet and seeding it with DNA is an example of directed panspermia.
The elderly CEO of Weyland Corporation, Peter Weyland, sponsors a trillion-dollar expedition to follow the chart to the faraway moon LV-223 aboard the research spacecraft Prometheus. The crew of the spacecraft travels in hibernation as the android David makes sure that everyone stays alive and well.
Upon their arrival, Shaw and Holloway make a presentation on their research to the crew. They claim they seek answers to the age-old questions of where we came from and who we came from to spring into existence. They claim our DNA was “engineered” by the same advanced alien species they seek on LV-223.
Immediately the biologist on the crew makes an objection, saying that they are discounting three-hundred years of Darwinism.
No, they are not at all. The aliens did not seed the planet with alien babies, they allegedly seeded Earth with microbes based on DNA that evolved life as we know it. This would demand the application of all the Darwinian principles of evolution. Evolution on Earth did not create DNA itself, the backbone of life on Earth. Our version of DNA was genetically engineered in a lab.
It turns out there is convincing scientific evidence to support the panspermia hypothesis. One line of evidence lies in our biological evolution, and especially that of microbes as the precursors to complex life. It suggests that microbes with DNA came from off-planet to kick-start life on Earth. Another line of evidence shows that our genetic coding itself, in all probability, was, in fact, designed and bears signatures saying so. Our genetic coding boasts nine prime numbers as a signature, a statistical chance of being natural at one in ten trillion. In other words, its ten trillion to one that we were genetically engineered. When we combine the two, that our DNA arose from sophisticated genetic engineering, and that our microbe evolution suggests “alien” donors of DNA to take the lead in creating life, then we can make a good case that we are of alien origin.
Another line of documented evidence that we are not alone lies with a very small interstellar visitor that zipped through our solar system in 2017. We only had eleven days to gather data on Oumuamua. It was thin, showed evidence of being metallic, was propelled by a force assumed to be the sun, and had so many unique properties that Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said that, rather then a comet or asteroid, it was a work of technology. According to Dr. Loeb, it was most likely some sort of light sail. His hypothesis and book on the subject shook up the scientific world.
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