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Published by Bear & Company
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Compelling evidence that life, intelligence, and evolution on Earth were seeded by comets and cosmic intelligence
• Explains how life first came from interstellar dust and comets and how later arrivals of cosmic dust and comets spurred evolution
• Explores the possibility that universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and how ancient cultures may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge
• Reveals new discoveries about the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza
All ancient cultures link humanity’s origins to the heavens. The Egyptians, for example, were adamant that their ancestors came from the stars of Orion and Sirius. Today, however, religion and science assert that life arose spontaneously here on Earth. Did the ancients know our true cosmic origins? Have they left us clues?
Expanding on the panspermia theory developed with the celebrated astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle--namely that the building blocks of life were imported to Earth by comets in the distant past--Chandra Wickramasinghe and Robert Bauval explore the latest findings in support of a cosmic origin for humanity. They detail the astrobiological discoveries of organic molecules deep in space, how microbes are incredibly resistant to the harshest conditions of space--enabling the transfer of genes from one star system to another, and the recent recovery of microorganisms from comets still in space. They argue that the universe was “born” and preset with the blueprint of life and that the cosmos must be teeming with lifeforms far older and perhaps far more developed than us. They show how life arrived on our planet in the form of interstellar dust containing alien bacteria approximately 3.8 billion years ago and how later comets, meteoroids, and asteroids brought new bacterial and viral genetic material, which was vital for evolution.
Using the latest advances in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, the authors explore how universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and cells, and they postulate that ancient cultures, such as the pyramid builders of Egypt and the temple builders of India, may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge. Sharing new discoveries from experienced architects, engineers, and mathematicians, they show how the Great Pyramid is a three-dimensional mathematical equation in stone, bearing a potent message for humanity across time and space about who we are and where we come from.
• Explains how life first came from interstellar dust and comets and how later arrivals of cosmic dust and comets spurred evolution
• Explores the possibility that universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and how ancient cultures may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge
• Reveals new discoveries about the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Giza
All ancient cultures link humanity’s origins to the heavens. The Egyptians, for example, were adamant that their ancestors came from the stars of Orion and Sirius. Today, however, religion and science assert that life arose spontaneously here on Earth. Did the ancients know our true cosmic origins? Have they left us clues?
Expanding on the panspermia theory developed with the celebrated astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle--namely that the building blocks of life were imported to Earth by comets in the distant past--Chandra Wickramasinghe and Robert Bauval explore the latest findings in support of a cosmic origin for humanity. They detail the astrobiological discoveries of organic molecules deep in space, how microbes are incredibly resistant to the harshest conditions of space--enabling the transfer of genes from one star system to another, and the recent recovery of microorganisms from comets still in space. They argue that the universe was “born” and preset with the blueprint of life and that the cosmos must be teeming with lifeforms far older and perhaps far more developed than us. They show how life arrived on our planet in the form of interstellar dust containing alien bacteria approximately 3.8 billion years ago and how later comets, meteoroids, and asteroids brought new bacterial and viral genetic material, which was vital for evolution.
Using the latest advances in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, the authors explore how universal knowledge may be stored in human DNA and cells, and they postulate that ancient cultures, such as the pyramid builders of Egypt and the temple builders of India, may have known a way to retrieve this knowledge. Sharing new discoveries from experienced architects, engineers, and mathematicians, they show how the Great Pyramid is a three-dimensional mathematical equation in stone, bearing a potent message for humanity across time and space about who we are and where we come from.
Excerpt
Chapter 6
Unravelling of a Controversy
Replication of Bacteria in a Cosmic Context
We all know that given the right conditions, which include water and nutrients, bacteria can grow exponentially. A typical doubling time for bacteria would be two to three hours. Continuing to supply nutrients, a single initial bacterium would generate some 240 offspring in four days, yielding a culture the size of a cube of sugar. Continuing for a further four days and the culture, now containing 280 bacteria, would be the size of a village pond. Another four days and the resulting 2120 bacteria would have the scale of the Pacific Ocean. Yet another four days and the 2160 bacteria would be comparable in mass to a molecular cloud like the Orion Nebula. And four days more still for a total time since the beginning of twenty days, and the bacterial mass would be that of a million galaxies. No non-biological process remotely matches this replication power of a biological cell. Once the immense quantity of organic material in the interstellar material is appreciated, a biological origin for it becomes a necessary conclusion. This was the position we had arrived at in 1980, and it continues to constitute one of the most compelling arguments in favor of cosmic biology.
But where are the astronomical locations where conditions for replication of bacteria can be found? Certainly not in the cold depths of space, where microbes could merely remain in a freeze-dried dormant state. Planets like the Earth provide too small a total mass of carbonaceous material in the right physical state to make any impact. It is therefore to comets we turned, arguing that comets are the main sources of biological particles in interstellar clouds. An individual comet is a rather insubstantial object. But our solar system possesses more than a hundred billion comets, that in total mass equal the combined masses of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune, about 1029 grams. If all the dwarf stars (sun-like stars) in our galaxy are similarly endowed with comets, then the total mass of all the comets in our galaxy, with its 1011 dwarf stars, turns out to be some 1040 grams, which is just the amount of all the interstellar organic particles that are found to be present in the dust clouds within the galaxy.
How would microorganisms be generated within comets, and then how could they get out of comets? We know as a matter of fact that comets do eject organic particles, typically at a rate of a million or more tons a day when they visit the inner, regions of the solar system. When the comets refreeze this amplified microbial material is also frozen in, only to be released when they become periodically warmed up in the inner solar system. Some of this bacterial matter may reach planets, which they can seed with life, some of it is expelled back into interstellar space.
Diseases from Space?
The next development in our story also came as a surprise and led to further clashes with orthodox science.12 June of 1977 was a particularly inclement month in Wales, and I had succumbed to one of the worst bouts of flu that I could remember. Fred Hoyle and I were in a phase of brisk telephone and fax communication at the time trying to fit a swathe of new astronomical data to our biological dust models.
All this was to change dramatically when, delirious with high fever, I telephoned Hoyle and posed the question, “Could this flu bug have possibly come from space? Could the old myth that influenza is connected with rain and drizzle be right after all? Could viruses and bacteria be carried in comet dust and actually be entering Earth to infect us at the present time?” I recalled that the connection between diseases like the common cold and influenza and inclement weather was well entrenched in Sri Lankan folklore. My mother always told us, “Don’t go out in the rain; you’ll catch the cold.”
My question to Fred brought down a pall of silence. He had listened to all that was said and replied, “I shall think about it and phone you back.” He did in fact telephone back only to agree that this could well be so! He was reminded of conversations he had many years ago with an Australian physicist E. G. (Taffy) Bowen who had pointed out that an amazing connection existed between freezing nuclei in rain clouds and meteor showers. So the evidence we needed may have already been there two decades earlier.
As a natural consequence of this line of thinking I guessed that patterns of viral diseases over the centuries may reflect the changing environment of cometary meteor showers--the Earth crossing the orbits of debris from different life-bearing comets. Could the common cold and influenza that are so common today have been absent in the portfolio of diseases in past times? I remember asking Hoyle another question. Did he know of any Shakespearean character with a common cold? Surely Shakespeare, who dealt with almost every human condition, may have thought fit to have a character sniffling with a heavy cold? After combing through Shakespeare’s plays the answer was that there were none.
This prompted us to study a variety books on medical history, including the writings of Hippocrates and Galen and the classic Indian medical treatise Charaka Samhita, all of which confirmed that there was certainly clear evidence of a changing pattern of infectious diseases over time. The twentieth-century belief that all pathogens must necessarily have a purely terrestrial origin had no basis in fact. We had argued earlier that comets carried the first life to the Earth 4.1 billion years ago, and this process of bringing new viruses and bacteria could not be assumed to have stopped at some distant time in the past. Comets are with us still and so must continue to have an effect.
Unravelling of a Controversy
Replication of Bacteria in a Cosmic Context
We all know that given the right conditions, which include water and nutrients, bacteria can grow exponentially. A typical doubling time for bacteria would be two to three hours. Continuing to supply nutrients, a single initial bacterium would generate some 240 offspring in four days, yielding a culture the size of a cube of sugar. Continuing for a further four days and the culture, now containing 280 bacteria, would be the size of a village pond. Another four days and the resulting 2120 bacteria would have the scale of the Pacific Ocean. Yet another four days and the 2160 bacteria would be comparable in mass to a molecular cloud like the Orion Nebula. And four days more still for a total time since the beginning of twenty days, and the bacterial mass would be that of a million galaxies. No non-biological process remotely matches this replication power of a biological cell. Once the immense quantity of organic material in the interstellar material is appreciated, a biological origin for it becomes a necessary conclusion. This was the position we had arrived at in 1980, and it continues to constitute one of the most compelling arguments in favor of cosmic biology.
But where are the astronomical locations where conditions for replication of bacteria can be found? Certainly not in the cold depths of space, where microbes could merely remain in a freeze-dried dormant state. Planets like the Earth provide too small a total mass of carbonaceous material in the right physical state to make any impact. It is therefore to comets we turned, arguing that comets are the main sources of biological particles in interstellar clouds. An individual comet is a rather insubstantial object. But our solar system possesses more than a hundred billion comets, that in total mass equal the combined masses of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune, about 1029 grams. If all the dwarf stars (sun-like stars) in our galaxy are similarly endowed with comets, then the total mass of all the comets in our galaxy, with its 1011 dwarf stars, turns out to be some 1040 grams, which is just the amount of all the interstellar organic particles that are found to be present in the dust clouds within the galaxy.
How would microorganisms be generated within comets, and then how could they get out of comets? We know as a matter of fact that comets do eject organic particles, typically at a rate of a million or more tons a day when they visit the inner, regions of the solar system. When the comets refreeze this amplified microbial material is also frozen in, only to be released when they become periodically warmed up in the inner solar system. Some of this bacterial matter may reach planets, which they can seed with life, some of it is expelled back into interstellar space.
Diseases from Space?
The next development in our story also came as a surprise and led to further clashes with orthodox science.12 June of 1977 was a particularly inclement month in Wales, and I had succumbed to one of the worst bouts of flu that I could remember. Fred Hoyle and I were in a phase of brisk telephone and fax communication at the time trying to fit a swathe of new astronomical data to our biological dust models.
All this was to change dramatically when, delirious with high fever, I telephoned Hoyle and posed the question, “Could this flu bug have possibly come from space? Could the old myth that influenza is connected with rain and drizzle be right after all? Could viruses and bacteria be carried in comet dust and actually be entering Earth to infect us at the present time?” I recalled that the connection between diseases like the common cold and influenza and inclement weather was well entrenched in Sri Lankan folklore. My mother always told us, “Don’t go out in the rain; you’ll catch the cold.”
My question to Fred brought down a pall of silence. He had listened to all that was said and replied, “I shall think about it and phone you back.” He did in fact telephone back only to agree that this could well be so! He was reminded of conversations he had many years ago with an Australian physicist E. G. (Taffy) Bowen who had pointed out that an amazing connection existed between freezing nuclei in rain clouds and meteor showers. So the evidence we needed may have already been there two decades earlier.
As a natural consequence of this line of thinking I guessed that patterns of viral diseases over the centuries may reflect the changing environment of cometary meteor showers--the Earth crossing the orbits of debris from different life-bearing comets. Could the common cold and influenza that are so common today have been absent in the portfolio of diseases in past times? I remember asking Hoyle another question. Did he know of any Shakespearean character with a common cold? Surely Shakespeare, who dealt with almost every human condition, may have thought fit to have a character sniffling with a heavy cold? After combing through Shakespeare’s plays the answer was that there were none.
This prompted us to study a variety books on medical history, including the writings of Hippocrates and Galen and the classic Indian medical treatise Charaka Samhita, all of which confirmed that there was certainly clear evidence of a changing pattern of infectious diseases over time. The twentieth-century belief that all pathogens must necessarily have a purely terrestrial origin had no basis in fact. We had argued earlier that comets carried the first life to the Earth 4.1 billion years ago, and this process of bringing new viruses and bacteria could not be assumed to have stopped at some distant time in the past. Comets are with us still and so must continue to have an effect.
Product Details
- Publisher: Bear & Company (December 19, 2017)
- Length: 408 pages
- ISBN13: 9781591433088
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Raves and Reviews
“Beginning in the 1960s, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., together with Fred Hoyle systematically founded the new science of astrobiology. Their discoveries and explanations--reported in numerous scientific papers and eloquently written books--put them in a class of their own, in the same pantheon of scientific immortals as Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. And now, the brilliant astrophysicist and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., has joined with Robert Bauval in bringing Cosmic Womb to a new early 21st-century audience. Cosmic Womb is required reading for all those who want to understand the origins of life on Earth and throughout the cosmos. It is that important.”
– Edward J. Steele, Ph.D., molecular immunologist
“A fascinating book based on cutting-edge science that gives us twofold, compelling evidence--first that life (as molecules or bacteria) seeded in the whole cosmos via comets and hence there is a high probability of advanced intelligent civilizations all around us, and second, the embedding of pi, phi, geodetic units, the circumference of Earth, and the speed of light in the Great Pyramid leaves us no alternative but to admit that such a highly scientific civilization has indeed left its imprint on our planet.”
– Chris H. Hardy, Ph.D., systems scientist and author of DNA of the Gods
“Cosmic Womb is a book that ties together much of the cuttingedge science and theories that are defining a new paradigm of human origin and self-discovery. It is a masterpiece of investigative research that speaks to a cosmic foundation for the development and evolution of human consciousness, technology, and civilization.”
– Glenn Kreisberg, author of Spirits in Stone
“What a team! This one is really going to make you think!”
– David Rohl, Egyptologist and author of A Test of Time
“Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., starts off by inviting us to join him on his journey as a scientist searching for the origins of life on our planet. His passion for the topic and his joy with each new discovery are contagious and spellbinding. Then Robert Bauval continues the journey by bringing fresh insights into the Giza pyramid complex as he did in his bestselling book The Orion Mystery.”
– Will Hart, author of Ancient Alien Ancestors and The Genesis Race
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