2020: The War of the Worlds: Earthlings vs. The Corona Virus. Will We Win?
The Author’s Note:
This article is dedicated to Sifu Ir. Lau Tai Onn who taught and encouraged me to think and write.
By:
Lim Ju Boo
BSc PG Dip MSc
MD PhD FRSPH FRSM
Post-Doctoral CE:
Evolutionary Biol. (University of Cambridge) 2019
Astronomy (University of Oxford) 2019
Forensic Science: Toxicology (University of Cambridge) 2020
Formerly:
Senior Medical Researcher
Institute for Medical Research
Malaysia
Regional Staff Officer for Training in Emergency Medicine and Trauma Care
St. John Ambulance Malaysia
Currently:
Dynapharm Int’l Pharmaceutical Group
(1994 - today)
The Blogger’s Note:
The blogger is most honored to be requested by Dr. JB Lim to post hereunder his latest masterpiece on Sunday, April 26, 2020. It is an interesting read to find out how Dr. Lim as a very senior medical scientist and researcher postulates the origin of Coronavirus and outlines the battle between them and us humans.
Sun, Apr 26, 9:58 PM
Dear Ir. Lau Tai Onn,
This is an abridged version of 40 pages (11,717 words) from my original 68,974 word essay which I shall publish later as I still need to add a few hundred references from research papers into the essay.
The original essay has already surpassed the length of my previous MSc dissertation but is still far below the length of my PhD thesis, and I am trying to beat this record.
The Movie I saw:
In 1953 when I was a child I went with my eldest and late sister to Rex theatre in my home state of Johore in Malaya then to watch a movie "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells. It was a very frightening, yet exciting movie to watch huge machine-like aliens from Mars invading Earth. I could till today remember many scenes where the Martians with tentacle probes would send them into every corner to search for humans hiding in nooks and corners. When satisfied no human was there, they would withdraw their camera-like detectors.
It was very frightening for me of course as I was just beginning my teens even though I knew it was just a movie based on a science fiction HG Wells wrote. I remember the world stood united together during that alien invasion from another world, and collectively all nations of the world stood in solidarity using their combined armies to defend themselves against the aliens.
The world fought vigorously against the Martians, but none of our weapons had effect on them. I remember as a final resort they used hydrogen bombs, yet after the mushroom clouds subsided, those huge machine-like Martians were still there standing untouched. Naturally in such a scenario it was very frightening. It was they against us and we earthlings seemed to have lost despite our combined world armies. But at last, there was an unexpected happy ending. The Martians began to crumble to the ground.
The reason given was, it was not our mighty armies and hydrogen bombs that brought them down, but it was our tiny, tiny bacteria for which aliens from another world had no immunity. What a relief it was for my sister and me watching in awe at those huge aliens attacking us for which we had no chance of defending being brought down by our earthly tiny microbes in our soil living together with us.
At that time I had little understanding about other worlds, about microbes and immunity or whether or not there was other life elsewhere other than our own. But that movie made an ever-lasting memory for me since then. I can still visualize some of the scenes I saw in that movie. Never have I thought this famous science fiction by HG Wells becomes somewhat a reality 67 years on, except now the order of the invasion is in reverse.
The Pandemic:
What the entire world now is experiencing is an enact of what HG Wells wrote in 1897. The Pandemic: We are currently facing a global invasion by a tinny-tiny virus called the coronavirus, a new virus that first emerged at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, China and has since caused hundreds of thousands of deaths world-wide due to respiratory failure.
The outbreak of this disease, also known as SARS-CoV-2, is a newly discovered virus closely related to bat coronaviruses (1). Dubbed as the pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV, it is a virus that looks like a spherical crown over its entire head and body so to speak, and is armed with spikes protruding all overs its crown. Virologists blame animals like bats, pangolins, wild life and even the camels during the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a viral respiratory disease new to humans first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012 as carriers of these diseases that has since spread to many other countries.
During this current covid-19 pandemic, America accused China of creating this virus with President D Trump labeling it as a "Chinese virus" while China blamed the United States for importing it to China to destroy her rising economy, Iran accused both the US for creating this virus for bio-terrorism while their cleric believe it was the punishment by Allah on China for her ill treatment of her Uyghur Muslims. Ironically, soon after Iran believed it was the punishment by Allah on China, Iran was heavily rained down by this virus causing it to be one of the most hit countries with 82,211 confirmed cases, 57,023 recovered and 5,118 deaths as on 20 April, 2020, with figures still counting.
Meantime, scientists especially the virologists said it was neither China nor the US that created this virus to destroy the economy of each other, but it was actually either the bats or the pangolins that carried this virus to humans in what they call it a zoonotic disease.
But neither President D Trump, President Xi Jinping would admit if their country created it, nor the virologists have explained how this virus first came into existence before it went into the bats, if at all it originated from the bats and was not created in the secret labs in China or in the US? Viruses including coronavirus are pre-life protein particles made of genetic materials consisting of a short chain of RNA that encode the structure of the protein (capsid) by which the virus acts and to protects its genetic material with a lipid coat over it, and as such, it is not possible, at least to my understanding, for any person or country to synthesize such a structure.
Frog in a Well:
While scientists and politicians argue its origin they never look up into the sky to suspect if viruses were actually rained down on Earth from outer space. We seem to be concerned that all life can only originate and exist on Earth and nowhere else in the entire Universe containing myriad of other worlds which we shall discuss shortly. It looks like all the discussions about this coronavirus so far must come from one of the animals living on this Earth and nowhere else.
Envisaging the origins of life captivates both scientists and the general public. We need to shed some light on the origin and the evolutionary history of viruses and life itself. We have no clear explanation on its origin of viruses or other life forms till this day.
We may have to look at the possibility that viruses may have arisen from the first syntheses of three components consisting of a 5 carbon pentose sugar called ribose, a phosphate group, and a nitrogenous base to form the first nucleotide that made the first RNA molecules a few billion years after the creation of the universe and earth.
Miller’s Experiment:
Miller and his colleague Urey conducted chemical experiments that simulated the conditions thought at the time (1952) to be present on the early Earth to explain the chemical origin of life under those conditions. They managed to simulate conditions on the primitive Earth that favoured chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors.
Considered to be the classical experiment investigating abiogenesis, it was conducted in 1952 by Stanley Miller, with assistance from Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, San Diego and his paper was published the following year. (2) (3) (4).
The Primordial Oceans:Some 4 billion years ago, it may have been possible to envisage through this experiment a very huge amount of RNA molecules may have been floating around in the oceans without any living animals around to host them.
Whether this synthesis was by Intelligent Design, or by random chance, these non-life viral RNA may have been fused together randomly into longer chains of RNA and more complex DNA giving rise to living organisms.
In order to achieve this synthesis, huge amounts of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen from which life chemical elements were formulated have to be generated through nucleo-synthesis in the Sun and in the interior of stars. That took place soon after the Big Bang during the creation of the Universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
In fact it has been published by Scientific America, concurred by astronomers, and other scientists that we and all life on Earth are made from star dusts ejected during a supernova explosion of massive stars. The amalgamation of nucleic acids into viruses may likely be the same as bacteria which are known to assimilate long fragments of stray DNA from the environment discarded by the dead cells of other organisms, and incorporate them into their own genomes.
This was one of the first things we learnt in 2019 when I was a post-doctoral student in evolutionary biology at the University of Cambridge.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that bacteria are even able to incorporate short and damaged stretches of DNA, even from 43,000-year-old fragments extracted from a woolly mammoth bone. This ability is known as natural genetic transformation, a form of horizontal gene transfer by guzzling up chunks of other organisms’ DNA present in the environment. This genetic adoption is thought to be important in bacterial evolution.
The same genetic transfer may also have arisen by incorporating floating nucleic acids in the oceans during ancient environments to give birth to virus RNA even without any living host present 3,800 to 3,600 million years ago. It may be the beginning of prebiotic chemistry when viruses were first synthesized.
These were the first genetic elements to give rise to RNA molecules from which viruses and subsequently all life came into existence. Perhaps viruses existed much earlier than all life forms, and their presence may have led to the evolution of cellular life. Scientists have put forward other theories but at this point in time we are debating. We may not be surprised that future studies may divulge more information on the origin of viruses more weird than we expect. (5)
But we are very sure viruses did not first come from bats, pangolins, camels, wild life or any animals in existence as all microorganisms including viruses predated all animals and mammals by 3.59 billion years.
The first RNA world began in 3.8 billion years ago and the first mammal only surfaced 210 million years ago. Viruses, bacteria and all microorganisms must evolve first before any higher living forms of life came into reality, and never the other way round as some virologists may speculate. Of course like all microorganisms and bacteria, viruses can invade and infect other species of life that evolved much later.
The question is not which came first, but the dilemma we face is when and how did this coronavirus first emerge, let alone how did it suddenly become pathogenic and contagious? Their origins and pathogenic attributes definitely was not generated spontaneously in the bodies of bats, pangolins, camels or other mammals virologists care to name and blame.
Evolutionary biologists have clearly shown the presence of simple life forms such as microorganisms existed first during the pre-Cambrian Era that pre-dated the Cambrian Era after which there was an almost sudden bloom like flowers in a field into many higher life forms as shown through fossil studies.
We call this period as the Cambrian radiation an incidence approximately 541 million years ago in the Cambrian period when practically all major animal phyla started to emerge in the fossil record. This lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla.
Bats only started to make their appearances about 50-60 million years ago. The oldest fossilized remains of bats were dated around 50-60 million years ago during the early Eocene Epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago compared to virus evolutionary history that emerged around 1.5 billion years ago.
Interestingly the morphology and appearance of bats has not changed much until today. But as to how this particular coronavirus came into being at the present time is hotly debated. Scientists are trying hard to determine how Covid-19 started, where it came from and how it spread to humans.
According to popular beliefs in circulations the coronavirus, covid-19 to be specific, arose from Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market. They made this assumption as it was linked to several of China’s first coronavirus patients.
In the eyes of the public, this assumption on the origin of coronavirus seems well accepted because it was in December 2019 someone at the now world-famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was infected with a virus from an animal - at least this was believed.
This part of the story is still in circulation with Covid-19 spreading from that first cluster in the capital of China’s Hubei province to a global pandemic that has claimed the lives of a few hundred thousand people so far.
But other scientists claimed it was actually the scaly anteater –the mammal pangolin that was the reservoir of the virus before it was transmitted to humans. Again we ask which came first. Was it the chicken or the egg so to speak? Then there was another dilemma facing the virologists about the strains of the virus.
There is this indecision about which strain of the original corona virus became the Covid-19 subspecies that is now in circulation among humans.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have since identified numerous other strains of the virus found in different countries. This makes the problem even more complicated if not totally mysterious when we do not even have a clear idea how the pandemic started in the first place, and how to contain it.
But according to Prof Stephen Turner, head of the department of microbiology at Monash University in Australia, he insisted it was most likely the virus originated from bats. On the premise that the virus surfaced from Wuhan wild animal market caused by the interaction between animals and humans, yet Turner thinks this is inconclusive. “Part of the problem is that the information is only as good as the surveillance,” he added and that viruses of this type are in circulation all the time in the animal kingdom. So again there is division among scientists.
The fact that the virus has infected a tiger in a New York zoo shows how viruses can move around between species, Turner says. “Understanding the breadth of species this virus can infect is important as it helps us narrow down where it might have come from.” Turner concluded.
Despite uncertainty, some scientists still hypothesize this coronavirus was likely to have originated from bats but first passed through an intermediary animal in the same way that the 2002 SARS outbreak came from horseshoe bats to cat-like civets before infecting humans (6).
One reason they gave is that Chinese scientists constructed the whole genomic sequence of COVID-1, and found its genome sequence is 79 percent similar to the SARS-CoV, about 51.8 percent similar to the MERS-CoV, and about 87.6 - 87.7 percent similar to other SARS-like CoVs from Chinese horseshoe bats (called ZC45 and ZXC21).
Thus they suggested that this virus may have originated from bats. But similarity in genome sequence does not necessary mean they are the same, or originated from the same as much as primates and humans are entirely two separate species even they look alike morphologically. The human as well as the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have 24. Human chromosome 2 is a fusion of two chromosomes 2a and 2b that remained separate in the other primates. Hence we are entirely different from the primates.
But the coronavirus or any virus has a very short genomic sequence. On April 14, 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the completion of the coronavirus genome. All of the sequence, except for the leader sequence, was derived directly from viral RNA. The genome of SARS-CoV is 29,727 nucleotides in length. The sequence data confirmed that SARS-CoV is a previously unrecognized coronavirus (7).
But personally as a scientist who is familiar with evolutionary biology, I have my reservation on what other scientists and virologists have hypothesized. My own personal feeling is we actually do not know how this virus came into existence in the first place? It would be completely inconceivable for us to believe one of animals in the vast biodiversity of life on Earth generated the virus out from its own body, if at all the viruses have been in circulation among animals as Turner believes.
I think we are back to this dilemma in that we all have been all the while looking at Earth downwards like a frog in a well instead of looking outwards, and thinking out of the box.
I think scientists by looking inwards and confining all explanations as earthbound phenomenon, we become introverts. We just believe that all life including viruses must and “have to” come only from this planet and never find their origin outside this world. But before we try to discuss this mystery further, let us distract ourselves for a few moments from this discussion on the origin of this virus into worlds other than our own. We will need to bring in a vastly different field altogether – astronomy.
Bear with me. Let us begin this by examining and discussing the immensity of this universe even though it may seem irrelevant for the time being. Let’s see how this works out.
Since the time of the Big Bang 13.8 – 14.7 billion years ago the Universe has been expanding as shown by the red shifts on the spectrum of the galaxies. Let us begin by looking at the distance from Earth to the edge of the Universe since its beginning.
The distance between the Earth to the edge of the Observable Universe depends on time as it is believed to be still expanding after the Big Bang some 14.7 billion years ago. However some estimates put the current radius of the Observable Universe known as Hubble Radius as much as 46.508 billion light-years (14.27 billion parsecs) due to its rapid expansion, making the current diameter of the observable universe about 28.53 billion parsec or 93.016 billion light years across. (One parsec is approximately 31 trillion kilometers (3.1×10^13 km) or 19 trillion miles (1.9×10^13 miles) making one parsec at about 3.26 light-years).
This means the current diameter of an expanding universe is 8.8x10^23 km or 8.8x10^26 metres across. (1 billion = 1,000,000,000) At the speed of light it takes only 0.0425 second to cross the diameter of Earth but 2.935x10^18 seconds or 9.3x10^10 (93 billion years) to cross the diameter of an Observable Universe. (There are 3.154x10^7 seconds in a year). What does that mean? Let us drastically reduce this horrendously immense scale to something we are more familiar. Let us take the size of a grain of sand as the size of Earth.
Many videos on the size of the Universe can be compared such as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7yFDb1zOA (How big is the universe ... compared with a grain of sand ...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0 (How the Universe is Way Bigger Than You Think – YouTube)
If the above sites are not clickable, use Google search and type in:
Then scroll down for the 3 named videos above as some of the many examples illustrating the horrendous scale of the universe. Enjoy the illustrations
The Size of Earth as a Grain of Sand:
If we were to reduce this Earth to the average size of sand as a grain particle say 1 mm (0.001 meter) across, how large would the diameter of an Observable Universe be? Answer is 6.9x10^16 meters wide or 7.3 light years across. This is the distance to a star called WISE 0855−0714 which lies 7.27±0.13 light-years or 2.23±0.04 parsecs from Earth. WISE 0855−0714 (full designation WISE J085510.83−071442.5 (4) is a sub-brown dwarf. Its discovery was announced in April 2014 by Kevin Luhman using data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The size of Earth as a size of sand makes us really very, very tinny-tiny compared to the size of an expanding universe.
Maybe it is a little difficult to understand or imagine. Let us further reduce the size of Earth to the size of a corona virus to shrink the dimension of the universe to a manageable dimension within our imagination.
Earth - The Size of a Corona Virus:
The genomes of these viruses are positive-stranded RNA and are approximately 27-31kb in length. The diameter of a corona virus is thus estimated at about 300 nanometer (3x10^-7 meters) .
The answer is, the diameter of the Universe would be 2.07x10^13 meters in diameter or 2.07x10^10 km (20.7 billion km) wide or 53,850 times the Earth- Moon distance if Earth were to be shrunk to the size of a single corona virus. If we were to reduce Earth to the size of corona virus the distance to the diameter of an Observable Universe would take light 69110.75273 seconds or 1151.845879 minutes or 19.19743131 hr. (19 hr. 11 min 50.75 seconds) to cross that distance compared to just 8.3 minutes for light to arrive to Earth from the Sun.
Let's put it in another way. The average distance of Pluto from the Sun is 5.91x10^12 meters (5.91 billion km). This means if this Earth is the size of the corona virus then the diameter of the Observable Universe is 3.5 times the distance of the Sun to Pluto.
That's is truly very, very impressive the size of an Observable Universe. Human Size vs. the Coronavirus: The diameter of a corona virus is estimated at about 300 nanometer = 3x10^-7 meters Its volume V = 4/3 x π (re+3) = 1.4x10^-20 cubic metre If we compare this with the volume of a reference human with a mass of about 62 kg its average volume will be about 0.062 cubic metres. It works out that this coronavirus is 2.3x10^-19 (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 23) times smaller than an average human, or a human is 4.4x10^18 (44 ten million billion) times larger in volume than a coronavirus.
If a virus were to sit on the top of a grain of sand its size is just 2.16x10^-8 % or 0.0 000 000 216 % of the size of a grain of sand since the volume of 1 mm (0.001 m) diameter grain of sand = 5.24x10^-10 cubic metre. The volume of Earth is 1.083x10^21 cubic meters.
The volume ratio of a human to Earth siting on Earth’s surface is 5.7x10^-21 % That is 0.0 000 000 000 000 000 000 057 % Such comparison makes us all including the entire Earth very, very, very small indeed. That dimension makes us all very introvert like a frog in a well if we think that all life must only come from this this Planet Earth such as coronavirus coming from camels, bats and pangolins and nowhere else outside Planet Earth.
Beyond The Solar System and Pluto:
In short, if Earth were to be crushed to the size of the corona virus then the distance of the edge of the Universe that stretches outside our Solar System and well beyond Pluto. Wouldn’t it conceivable there maybe also myriads of other worlds and planets that may also have life including viruses and other microorganisms in them?
A Grain of Life in a Cosmic Ocean of Sterile Sands:
If we presume as scientists, biologists and microbiologists that only Earth has life on it, then our understanding is like an introvert loner standing on a vast, vast seashore as far as the misty horizon permits us to visualize, that there is only one grain of sand beneath our feet that is teeming with life, while the vast, vast ocean of sands far beyond are all sterile.
Is that what we as rational and thinking scientists and human beings accept as gospel truth? If that is so, then we are extremely arrogant and disrespectful to the Creator of Life.
Let me echo what Sir Isaac Newton, the most eminent scientific genius of all times, humbly admitted:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” (Isaac Newton)
Worlds beyond Pluto:
Pluto is considered to be the furthest planet in the Solar System although many more much further planets called exo-solar planets have been discovered by gravitational microlensing outside this Solar System.
A microlensing exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun that is detectable due to the effects that the gravitational field of its planetary system has on the passing light of a distant background star. These planets beyond Pluto and outside our Solar System are called exoplanets or extra-solar planets. They are planets revolving around other star systems discovered by using microlensing technique which is particularly well-suited to finding low-mass planets and planets around distant or very dim stars.
Astronomers have published findings on several different microlensing exoplanets, with masses ranging from more than Jupiter to only a few times more massive than our own Earth. (8) Other methods of detecting planets outside the Solar System beyond Pluto have also been used. Some 97% of all the confirmed exoplanets discovered so far were by using other indirect techniques mainly by radial velocity measurements and transit monitoring techniques.
By using various indirect methods astronomers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets so far. This is very impressive indeed since the discovery of the last and ninth planet Pluto, an icy dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and is the largest known dwarf planet.
Besides over 4,000 exoplanets already discovered, there could be untold numbers of exoplanets yet to be detected in the neighborhood of our Solar System, let alone throughout the Milky Way.
The presences of exoplanets in other stellar systems are not the only worlds in the Universe. Various estimates have been given on the number of stars in the Universe.
Even in our own Milky Way Galaxy it is estimated there are about a minimum 100 – 250 billion stars, and there may be up to 25 trillion galaxies in the universe. That means there may be up to 6.25x10^24 stars (6.25 trillion, trillion). About 7.6% percent of those stars are class G stars (like our Sun). If we assume there is at least one habitable planet like our Earth in each sun-like star like our own that has life, that means we can expect there may be at least 4.75x10^23 (475 followed by 21 zeros) life-giving worlds out there.
Intelligent Civilizations in the Galaxy:
When I first became interested in astronomy as an amateur astronomer in the mid-1970’s, that is before I underwent a formal course in astronomy along with astrobiology in 2019 from the University of Oxford, I came across a famous formula called Frank Drake equation formulated by him that calculates out the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.
The intriguing question Frank Drake and others including myself would ask is “are we alone?” There are billions of trillion of stars and galaxies out there. So we ask ourselves where are all the aliens?
This is the central oddity posed by the Fermi Paradox, which endeavors to unravel why earthlings have not yet encountered extraterrestrial life. In the past, experts trying to make sense of the Fermi Paradox have looked to the Drake Equation to put a numeric value to the likelihood that extraterrestrial (especially intelligent) life exists anywhere other than on Earth.
Formulated by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, Drake Equation is as follows:
N = (R*)(fP)(ne)(fL)(fi)(fc)(L).
Let’s look at their values briefly:
N is the number of civilizations we might someday contact R* is the rate at which stars are formed in our galaxy fP is the fraction of stars that are orbited by planets fL is the fraction of planets that could potentially sustain life fi is the fraction of planets that could potentially support intelligent life fc is the fraction of civilizations that go on to build technology that we (or another civilization) might be able to detect from space L is the length of time that such a civilization would spend transmitting signals into space.
Some of these values are more or less clear-cut, like the number of stars orbited by exoplanets as we have already discussed. But others are highly hypothetical. Some scientists think that any answer to the Drake Equation should be presented as a range of values, not just a single number devoid of evidence which I concur.
When these numbers with these ranges were calculated, astronomers found that there may be anywhere between a 53 to a 99.6 percent chance that ours is the only civilization in the galaxy, and a 39 to 85 percent chance that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. But maybe we have not been able to make the most intelligent and logical estimates.
My own personal feeling on this equation is it has far too many theoretical assumptions. Personally it is very unsafe for us to make assumptions because the only example we have this far that has a technologically advanced civilization is Earth only.
But what about other life forms such as viruses, bacteria and microorganisms that have yet to transform themselves into higher life? But for the existence of other pre-life molecules such as prions, viruses, or other living organisms such as bacteria, microorganisms or higher life in all those quintillion (10x10^18) and sextillion (10x10^21) worlds out there the statistical probability is very high and very real.
But as far as Drake’s equation on technological advanced and intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy is concerned, I personally do not know because we have not found a similar advanced civilization like our own as we know it, let alone other intelligent civilizations for us to extrapolate from here. (9)(10)
Even the estimate for simple life forms depends on several factors around a star called habitable or Goldilocks zone.
The Goldilocks Zone:
In astronomy and astrobiology, the circum-stellar (around a star) habitable zone (CHZ), or simply the habitable zone, is the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure. (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)
This is the zone around a star where planets like Earth that have water and an atmosphere in it that can support life.
It is a region named after the three Goldilocks that broke into the home of a bear family, and finally found a bowl of porridge that was neither too hot, nor too cold, but just at the right temperature to eat.
In order for liquid water to exist the planet should be in a region such that the flux of light falling on a planet due to the host star should not be too low (ice will be formed) or too high (water will be evaporated).
The series of mathematical equations to be considered in the calculation for the Goldilocks Zone is extremely complex as many variables and assumptions need to be taken into account. However the simplest formula for approximation of "habitable zone" based only the luminosity of the parent star is given below:
Inner radius (R 1) of habitable zone in astronomical unit (AU) R 1 = square root (L star / 1.1)
Outer radius (R 0) of habitable zone in astronomical unit (AU) R 0 = square root (L star / 0.53)
Where, L is absolute luminosity of the star,
1 AU = distance between the center of Sun to the center of Earth.
We can make estimates based on this simple equation alone to calculate out how many stellar systems in our own Milky Way Galaxy only, would harbor life including all types of viruses like the coronavirus and the septillions of different types of microorganisms including a vast biodiversity of life like those found on Earth. Hence, we may not be alone in these vast, vast cosmic oceans of living sands.
This vast Universe could be teeming with all sorts of life forms unknown to us – from all types and kinds of pre-life viruses to highly advance technological civilizations. Why should Earth be the only exception with coronavirus and other viruses in it?
Oort Cloud:
Let’s not look too far into other stellar systems. Let’s just look around our neighborhood surrounding our Solar System. Astronomers believe beyond our Solar System and surround it lies a huge collection of mostly icy planetesimals including large collection comets surrounding the Sun called the Oort Cloud, named after the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort. Oort Cloud occupies an enormous space starting between 2,000-5,000 AU (2.992x10^11 - 7.48x10^11 km) from the Sun and stretching out to as far as 50,000 AU (7.48x10^12 km) or 7.5 trillion kilometers.
This is about a quarter of the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Some proposed Oort Cloud is much larger that surrounds the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years) away. But let us be conservative and take the lowest estimate of 2,000 AU (2.992x10^14 meters) from the Sun. For the sake of calculations, at this distance the cloud occupies a diameter of 50,000 AU (7.48x10^15 meters).
Let us now once again reduce the size of Earth to the average size of a grain of sand of 1 mm (0.001 meter). Using this comparative scale, the minimum distance of Oort Cloud from the Sun would be 23,481.4 meters (23.481 km) away, from where it will occupy a huge collection of planetoids within a sphere with a minimum diameter of 587,035 meters (587 km) across that is believed to surround the entire Solar System with the Sun just 11.74 meters away.
We shall look into the possibility a little later if this huge Oort Cloud may have seeded Earth with pre-life dusts and biomolecules like viruses to kick-start the origin of life on Earth.
But let’s explore other possibilities.
Origin of Life:
The earliest known life-forms on Earth are supposed to be fossilized microorganisms, found in hydrothermal vent precipitates. Their beginning may have been as early as 4.28 billion years ago, comparatively soon after the oceans were formed 4.41 billion years ago, and not long after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.
The study on the origin of life on Earth, called abiogenesis requires a combination of molecular biology, paleontology, astrobiology, oceanography, biophysics, geochemistry and biochemistry. Scientists using their knowledge in astronomy, biology and astrobiology try to determine how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life by understanding the geophysical, chemical, or biological scenarios that took place soon after the oceans came into existence. Scientists then try to combine all possible events that may have taken place since life may have arisen under conditions that are strikingly different from those on Earth today.
It may not even have arisen from Earth in the first place when Earth was created or formed 4.543 billion years ago since its temperature of Earth then was estimated at 2,300 Kelvin. At that temperature the Earth was void and sterile, and no life could have existed during the Hadean years (named after Hades or hell).
It took a very long time, a period between 2,000 to 3,500 million years ago, namely 2.543 billion - 1.043 billion years since Earth was created before the ocean temperatures cooled sufficiently to around 55 - 85 °C and the period between 2,000 to 3,500 million years ago that photosynthesis began, followed by more cooling to milder temperatures of between 10 - 40 °C, and by 2700 - 1900 million years ago that life began to exist when the first eukaryotes and sexual reproduction became possible after the Precambrian Era onward.
The Precambrian Era includes the Hadean (approximately 4.6 - 4 billion years), Archean (4 - 2.5 billion), and Proterozoic (2.5 billion - 541 million) eons. Well-maintained microscopic fossils of bacteria older than 3.46 billion years have been found in Western Australia. (16).
The solitary multi-cellular life forms found at the end of the Precambrian Era were in the oceans and included some groups such as jellyfishes and segmented worms (annelids). Probable fossils 100 million years older have been found in the same area. However, there is evidence that life could have evolved over 4.280 billion years ago. (17)(18)(19)(20).
There is a fairly solid record of bacterial life throughout the remainder (Proterozoic eon) of the Precambrian Era. But how was life including pre-life viruses and coronaviruses currently invading Earth first came into being in a sterile and void Earth?
Did it come from the hydrothermal vent in sea and ocean floors where the hydrothermal fluid temperatures can reach 400°C? We have no answer to this. Many theories on life’s origin have been forwarded, but none has been satisfactory. Did it arise by random chance from the abundance of nucleic acids, sugars and other organic compounds floating in the warm primordial oceans coalescing together?
Or was it brought to Earth by the impact of life-giving molecules crashing into the oceans from meteorites originating in the asteroid belt between the planets of Mars and Jupiter? Or was it by passing comets that peppered Earth with viruses and DNA if we accept life was actually brought and seeded onto Earth from another world since we have already discussed the immensity of this Universe, the horrendous numbers of sun-like stars, the numbers of extra-solar planets already being discovered? Alternatively others may think it was brought here by an Intelligent Designer.
Whatever the theory, we can also calculate out the numbers of Earth-like habitable planets from equations from the Goldilocks Zone, and the probability of pre-life molecules being brought here by passing comets from the staggering size of the Oort Cloud surrounding this entire Solar System.
All these information from discoveries and calculations including the immensity of this Universe and the number of stars we have already discussed. We only need to apply them to work out that life including coronavirus or other viruses and microorganisms could not have arisen spontaneously on Earth for no rhyme or reason let alone from bats, ant eater, camels or from any of some 1 - 2 million species of animal life on Earth, remembering that Earth initially was a searing hot and sterile world.
After the Earth has been cooled sufficiently viruses like the coronavirus may have arisen differently around 4000 million years ago when the first prebiotic chemistry may have occurred giving further evolution into the RNA world together with the first chemical fossils around 3800 million years ago. It is very certain in my argument that the current invasion of the coronavirus is not a recent event coming from bats and pangolins as virologists believe, and as a scientists myself familiar with evolutionary biology I strongly disagree with the virologists or any other biologists.
Number of Species on Earth:
Scientists have recently estimated that there are approximately 8.7 million species on Earth out of which 1-2 million are animals. Out of this estimated total number of species on Earth, 6.5 million species are found on land and 2.2 million (about 25 percent of the total) dwelling in the ocean depths. There is no way bats, pangolins or any animals out of such vast biodiversity of life on Earth that the coronavirus or any other virus or viruses have been generated by them out from their bodies or have been transmitted to them from another animal or from other species of life.
Even if this virus first originated from an animal and passed on to humans as a zoonotic disease as virologists believe, we have to seriously ask ourselves where did the first virus originated to infect the first animal before passing it down the chain of life till it came to the bats and pangolins, remembering there is an estimated 8.7 million other species on Earth to account for.
The Scenario:
Hence again if we imagine our Earth as a grain of sand 1 mm across, with the Sun the size of a ball 10.93 cm in size placed 11.74 metres away while we, together with the Sun, then this tiny, tiny “sand” is surrounded by a huge cloud of comets and icy dwarf planetoids probably bearing life or pre-life forms like viruses some 600 km wide place at 24 km away. So what are we on Earth if we were just the size of a grain of sand being surrounded together with the entire Solar System by a huge cloud of unknown amount of comets and icy minor worlds, some if not all probably harboring unknown life forms or pre-life biological molecules among them?
Occasionally the Sun will pull in towards Earth one or many of those untold numbers of comets bearing life forms hurtling towards the Sun and once near the vicinity of the Sun its radiation will vaporize its icy contents in which are trapped viruses kept for tens of millions or even billions of years in suspended animation at almost near absolute zero around 3 Kelvin in the frigid of space.
Once near the Sun, the heat of radiation from the Sun will thaw open its vicious load of pre-life molecules and virus-laden debris and spray our Earth with their dusts as it crosses the path of the tails the comets left behind each time Earth orbits round the Sun. With each crossing in its orbit around the Sun, the virus-laden tails of comets may spray Earth with all sorts of biomolecules, viruses which may account for the seasonal influenza Earth experiences each year.
Harbinger of Disease and Death:
All ancient civilizations view the passage of comets as bad omen including even many current scientists specializing in astrobiology who believe the passage of comets brings with it the harbinger of diseases and death on Earth.
A paper on “Comets and Contagion: Evolution, Plague, and Diseases from Space” was published by Rhawn Joseph and Chandra Wickramasinghe. (21).
Panspermia Theory:
The theory of pandemic has been illustrated by Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) and Nobel Prize laureate Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 1939) of the University of Cambridge and Cardiff University who proposed the panspermia theory that the origin of life beginning with viruses could have been brought to Earth by comets from the Oort Cloud that menacingly surrounds not just this tiny world, but the Sun and the entire Solar System. (22)(23)(24).
In fact there is a strong possibility that the entire Earth is being rained all the time by life-bearing biomolecules from cosmic and meteorite dusts that land into our soil for germination or looking for suitable living hosts to infect and multiply without us knowing it, giving rise to new life forms as part of evolution being continuously generated on Earth including perhaps this new coronavirus.
These pre-life biomolecules once they landed into our soil amidst hospitable living hosts on Earth will begin to germinate and multiple and inherit this world, meek and lowly they maybe among their living entertainers
For further reading open this site:
If the above site is not clickable, go to Google search and key in
“Evidence That Comets Could Have Seeded Life on Earth”
Past Pandemics:
Meteorite dusts peppered down on Earth as well as from passing comets could be responsible for periodic pandemic outbreaks in the past such as the Plague of Justinian (541-542), the Third Cholera Pandemic (1852–1860), the Sixth Cholera Pandemic (1910-1911), the Spanish flu in 1918 caused by the H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin which was the most severe outbreak in recent history, followed by the Asian Flu (1956-1958), the Flu Pandemic (1968), the HIV/AIDS Pandemic (2005-2012), showed that the pandemic fizzled out after a few months or a few years.
During ancient times there were no planes to fly tens of millions of people every month across the surface of Earth, and yet when a pandemic struck, the entire surface of this world was affected almost simultaneously. How do we explain previous pandemics occurring almost simultaneously when in ancient times or even in the 18th and 19th centuries there were no passenger-carrying planes? We cannot blame bats, birds or any animal for spreading disease anymore. They cannot fly so far and that fast like modern commercial jet planes carrying tens of millions of passengers yearly or monthly across vast stretches of oceans, over deserts and continents and over lofty mountains at lightning speed to spread disease-carrying bacteria, viruses and other pathogens instantaneously through human transmission.
Obviously there is only one possibility, and that is, these viruses and disease-carrying particles were seeded from outer space over the entire surface of Earth in chorus by passing comets. Whatever the reason past pandemics were able to strike at lightning speed, and yet it seemed earthlings have succeeded in winning every war against these pandemic invasions even though modern medicine and mass vaccinations have not yet existed. What about the current Covid-19 in this 21st Century? Will this be the same as in previous past when pandemic seemed to naturally fizzle out without modern medical and preventive intervention?
Now that we have done with all the theories and explanation needed, let us now turn the years back to 1898, which was 122 years ago when HG Wells first published his science fiction "The War of the Worlds" . HG Wells wrote of giant machine-like aliens, the Martians against us tiny humans in the battle between the two - us and them. He wrote about our combined world armies including our hydrogen bombs at least years later in the movie in dealing with giant aliens.
Despite Earth being our world and home, and despite we stood in solidarity against the Martians, yet we lost. That at least was portrayed in the movie I saw in 1956, 64 years ago when I was just at the start of my teens It was just about mid-way through between the first publication of his book, the movie based on his book I saw, to the present. It was a science fiction he penned made into a movie. But now this alien invasion is for real. It is no longer a science fiction. Everything this time is in the reverse order. We are being invaded by aliens for sure.
This time round our alien invaders are so much more tiny than us, in fact 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 23 times smaller than us or we humans are 44 ten million billion times larger than them. Now they are challenging us face-to-face, we as David, and they as Goliath, with reversal in size. No longer do they need to use tentacles-like probes to enter into each small nook and corner of our homes.
This time round they merely enter into our body in armies of tens of millions or even in billions each of them wearing a regal crown with spikes covering all over their heads and bodies to seek and invade. No longer are our microbes from the soil going to fight for us. This time round we need to call out our own army residing in our body forever safeguarding us. They are called the T and B cells, which is only 8 - 10 microns (8x10^-6 to 1x10^-5 meters) in diameter and they may have to challenge our much smaller invaders face-to-face.
In fact our invaders are only 0.04 - 0.03 times the size of our virus-fighting T and B cells respectively. The size of our invaders – the coronavirus is just 3 x 10^-7 metres in length. Our T and B cells instead of fighting them physically, they are going to produce chemical weapons called antibodies against them.
HG Wells wrote about small microbes from our soil outside our body that fought against Martian giants and we won. But not this time round. We need to use an alternative strategy. Human Immunological System: But what are these B and T cells? These are immune cells produced by the white blood cells called lymphocytes or plasma cells and they are either plasma B or plasma T cells. Our T cell “army” is involved in cell-mediated immunity, while our B cell army is generally in charge of humoral immunity (relating to antibodies).
The function of T cells and B cells is to identify specific "non-self" antigens, during a process known as antigen presentation. So instead of using hydrogen bombs against Martians invaders what our B and T cells armies are going to do is to produce antibodies, namely various kinds and types called immunoglobulin such as IgG, IgM, IgA, IgD and IgE and sub-types against them as much as the defense system of a country is divided into many types – land and air forces, and the navy.
A century and a quarter on we are using not our combined world armies to battle these tinny-tiny aliens from another world, but we will be using our own collective immunological defenses passed on from human-to-human against an alien invasion. In this live story, who is going to win this war of the worlds?
Let's see how this is going to work:
It is obvious we cannot use our combined world powerful air and land forces and our navies against these almost molecular size invaders. So we need to size-down our collective B and T cells armies to almost match-for-match size against the invaders. What is our strategy? In immunology, viruses have a surface coat of protein called antigens (Ag). The Ag abbreviation stands for an antibody generator.
When they invade, our bodies challenge them with antibodies or immunoglobulin abbreviated as (Ab) which attaches them to the cell surface of Ab B cell antigen receptor (BCR). They in turn lock themselves to the protein coat (surface antigen) of the coronavirus to prevent them from entry into our body cells. Both B and T cells are cellular components of adaptive immunity. This is how our microscopic army is going to defend us.
If we look at the history of epidemic and pandemic from the evolutionary biology point of view on how life on planet Earth adapts by natural selection, we probably stand a good chance by our collective immunological sharing. What this means is, we get together to defend ourselves as a human race what some scientists refer as a “herd immunity” defined as “the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results if a sufficiently high proportion of individuals are immune to the disease, especially through vaccination”.
But as a former medical scientist and researcher myself, I would rather call this phenomenon “a collective human immunological defense” acquired by our own body antibody and / or antigen passed on from an infected person or population to the next unprotected person or population by natural selection instead of being induced artificially through vaccination since "the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease".
Alternatively, we may also term it as “transferred immunity” – at least this is what I may also like to coin it.
What this means is that when a person is infected by sufficient load of coronaviruses, they will be challenged by our B and T cells that can recognize the viral antigen on the surface of its protein coat. They then start to produce and secrete the chemical weapons called antibodies or immunoglobulin to destroy the pathogens. The T cells can only recognize viral antigens outside the infected cells whereas B cells can recognize the surface antigens of bacteria and viruses.
Various types and amounts of immunoglobulin such as IgM, and IgE will be secreted by these B and T cells depending on the antigen presentation from the virus and the amount of virus load of an infected individual. Some immuno-compromised individuals may not be able to respond at all. An immunological response gives rise to an antigen-antibody complex abbreviated as Ag-Ig or Ag-IgM…etc.
When that happens, the virus is locked by the immunoglobulin as an Ag-Ig. complex making the virus less infective to himself and to the second person when transmitted. The second person then recognizes the weakened virus introduced into his body through infection. He may still produce more antibodies against it to deteriorate the virus further. When the second person passes on the compromised viral antigen to the third, fourth, fifth …victims and so on, the virus will get weaker and limper until it is no longer contagious.
The attenuated virus may still remain in the body, but causing him no harm. Thus he / she may still be tested positive for the antigen (virus) but he / she remains healthy and asymptomatic. We can label him as a “healthy carrier”.
What this also means, the virus has been effectively locked by a series of antibodies passed on from person-to-person rendering it no longer virulent. This collective immunological challenge has been described by some immunologists as “herd immunity” although they explain it in another way through vaccination, although I prefer to forward my own independent thinking and hypothesis.
I would label it as “natural vaccination” or “transferred immunity” similar to acquired immunity passed on from mother to child except this transfer occurs outside the body from person-to-person through infection.
However it may require a large population of people to be infected first before shared immunity can pass down its protection to the remaining unprotected population. “Natural vaccination” (collective or herd immunity) is a “living vaccination” unlike one dose or multiple booster doses of artificially-induced vaccination.
In natural vaccination the immunological profile is continuously and seamlessly changing all the time inside the living body according to how the virus mutates and presents itself genetically. The body challenges the virus by modifying itself according to the virus genomic signature. Artificially-induced vaccination by injection or via oral drops works just in one step.
Vaccine does not change itself once it is introduced into the body, and they also do not work anymore once a virus mutates into different strains since vaccines are manufactured based on a single strain or antigen specificity and even by using mixed strains of the viruses, the virus can still change into multiple strains extremely fast whether inside or outside the body. In short, there is nothing like natural immunity that operates automatically inside a living body accordingly to endogenous variations in the pathogenic challenges.
In fact based on this principle of shared immunity, it may be more protective to allow a person who has already fully recovered from the coronavirus infection to come in contact with an immuno-compromised person or a population who has not been infected yet, so that the attenuated virus which has already been locked and weakened by the antibodies of the recovered patient can be passed on to the next unexposed person or community through tempered infections.
I personally would coin it as “natural vaccination”in my own thinking while other immunologists may prefer to call this phenomenon as “herd immunity”.
My thinking is exactly in the same model as the natural prophylactic mechanism observed as when in 1796 an English doctor named Edward Jenner spotted that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox did not show any symptoms of smallpox after natural exposure to coxpow.
That was indeed natural vaccination, and NOT one introduced artificially by injections or oral drops.
Once locked in by the antibodies it is very difficult for the virus to unlock the antibodies as this requires specific enzymes to unlock the antigen-antibody complex.
The virus is genetically not capable of doing this, namely dislodging a tightly knitted molecular complex as the virus genome is much shorter and simpler than the enzyme it need to produce, and it is incapable of producing a protein enzyme more complex than its own protein surface-coat (capsid). Hope this simple explanation is very clear.
The only thing the virus may be capable of doing is to mutate into a different genomic signature to dislodge the antibody, and that is the real, real danger to the human race. But this takes time.
To do this, it may have to infect a new host such as a bat, bird, tiger, cat, or any other suitable animal hosts that are willing to accommodate them and that does not produce the same human antibodies to lock them.
There they will change its genomic profile and antigen presentation for a few months or for a few years to lie very low before jumping back to humans to launch a different pandemic scenario. That is our greatest fear.
We can clearly see this epidemic chapter been changed drastically from the previous N1H1 and SARS outbreak 2 decades ago that was less virulent than the present Covid-19 pandemic.
We may only think we are safe once the epidemic curve flattens, but to the best of training and understanding in evolutionary biology, hence my understanding in Darwinism Medicine. We are living in false security.
That is how all viruses and bacterial life mutates and higher life speciates into more adaptable strains and species in order to thrive and flourish on this challenging, competitive and hostile Planet Earth.
I am afraid whether we like it or not, series of pestilence, epidemic / pandemic chapters have yet to come to pass endlessly after this coronavirus pandemic, with each episode much more aggressive than the previous, liken to Covid-19 worse off than the previous SARS outbreak believed to be from the same mutated virus.
Disease and pestilence throughout mankind is clearly revealed in Luke 21:11, Psalm 91:6, Jeremiah 42:17, Ezekiel 7:15, Ezekiel 14:19, Habakkuk 3:5, Leviticus 26:25, Numbers 14:12… all the way in the Bible up to Revelation 6:7-8.
There is no escape for any nation, race, creed or faith for any human on Earth. Do not think God by any name will come down to help us. It was and is still His eternal design that disease, pestilence and famine must come to pass.
I am afraid that is how the Creator and Designer of all life plug-in His Program how His life-giving Spirit will hover over the entire heaven and the Universe, including myriads of other worlds unknown and unseen by us.
Just do not think our social distancing, lockdown, obsessive hand washing, wearing face masks are going to kill this virus, and that we are going to be safe forever. Think again, and think hard and logically.
Think again in the eyes of an evolutionary biologist or as an astrobiologist that life could have come initially from heaven, and not sprout out spontaneously from bats and animals or from a once searing hot and sterile world which was void and dark when first came into existence 4.6 billion years ago.
Unknown Risk:
However promising collective immunological defenses may seem we are not sure what will happen next? In the eyes of evolutionary biologists there may be a risk in that the destabilized virus previously exposed to human immunoglobulin may mutate and change its genomic presentation to unlock itself into more virulent and lethal strains as part of Natural Selection for them to be more adapted.
They may return to an animal host to mutate for a period of time, partly because they were confronted by our immune system, and partly they still require a living vector to genetically transfigure themselves and multiply inside a friendlier animal host before jumping back to humans more virulent than ever. This is our predicament with this virus because they can change their pathogenic signature very fast according to the biological laws of Natural Selection programmed in them.
We can see this example during the SARS 2002–2003 epidemic, which causes much less death than the present Covcid-19 that became pandemic claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and has not shown flattening in the epidemic curve. SARS-CoV that caused SARS 18 years ago is believed to be almost the same virus that causes the current COVID-19, also known as SARS-CoV-2. The current strain is probably the mutant strain of the previous one, and I think scientists are still looking into this problem, especially how to develop a vaccine that maybe effective for all mutant strains?
At least 3 different strains of the coronavirus have been identified and their locations mapped out by scientists at the University of Cambridge recently.
Their different strains may account for huge differences in the infectivity, morbidity, incidence and mortality rates in different regions of the world
More Scary:
What is even more intimating to the human race is not just human-to-human transmission as it is now, or even from bats, pangolins or any other animals into humans and back to the animals. What is most scary and unpredictable is whether or not the insect world such as the mosquitoes can act as carriers to the coronavirus if they find short of suitable animals carriers. We know that the insect kingdom is the most prolific and abundant of all species on Earth.
The amount of ants crawling over the surface of this Earth for instance has been estimated to the tune one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) with more than 12,000 species around. According to Hogg, a Professor of Entomology, scientists have already identified about 925,000 species of insects with much more still unidentified. It is estimated the total number of insect species alone, and not the total number of insects, falls as high as 30 million.
What about the indestructible mosquitoes that are carriers of viruses and parasites like malaria, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, filariasis, tularemia, dirofilariasis, Japanese encephalitis, Saint Louis encephalitis, Western equine encephalitis, Eastern equine encephalitis, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ross River fever, Barmah Forest fever…? Mosquitoes similar to the modern species were found in 79-million-year-old Canadian amber from the Cretaceous Period. An older species found in Burmese amber was estimated at between 90 to 100 million years old. They are here to stay and to spread disease.
Fortunately this far we know mosquitoes and the untold numbers of species of insects have not shown any evidence they carry the coronavirus. But assuming one day this or other pathogenic virus do hijack insects as alternative hosts to infect humans.
In such a scenario, the human race that was the last to appear on Earth is doomed to be the first to be wiped out from the surface of Earth. Obviously there is no way we can destroy all the insects and mosquitoes before they destroy us. For the moment it seems logical and sound to isolate ourselves by staying at home, social distancing, washing our hands with soap and water frequently or by wearing a face mask, these preventive measures may block their path of transmission, but there is no way we can make animal vectors like bats and pangolins, or cats, dogs, birds, mosquitoes and the insects do the same.
Unfortunately this is how The Intelligent Designer programs His strategy how life needs to adapt and change for them to evolve into better and better species when the environment threatens their existence. Because the RNA sequence of SARS-CoV is only a short 29,727 nucleotides in length, it can easily mutate to have a far greater advantage over us who are already so specialized and fully developed that there is no longer any room or time for us to “mutate” or change ourselves anatomically, biologically and functionally to challenge the virus against their constantly changing genomic signatures.
This current pandemic may be the first or second episode in a series of identical pandemic chapters to attack us. There may be more to come, with each episode becoming harder and harder to manage because of the modifications of the virus genomic profile into hardier and more resilient.
Unfortunately we are not even clear what would be the long term effect if we block the virus out completely with our preventive measures such as lockdown and social distancing. Genetic Drifts: There is yet another problem.
In evolutionary biology and population genetics we know that if a population is isolated for whatever the reason it may cause what we call a “founder effect” (loss of genetic variation when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger population), or a “bottleneck effect” (when size of a virus population is severely reduced). When that happens, the organism then undergoes a “genetic drift” to colonize themselves elsewhere as a more resilient species or a different population strain of bacteria or viruses.
This is perhaps what we are already experiencing with a few new strains of Covid-19 already appearing initially believed to be from bats and pangolins then jumped ship into humans as they spread across various parts of the world probably as a result of preventive measures taken by various countries during the outbreak.
Summary:
In summary, this current pandemic may pose a short term threat to earthlings or it may be a long-drawn intimidation and war against mankind. The outcome depends on its actual source, whether it was originated from bats, pangolins and wild life existing on Earth, or was it peppered down on Earth by virus-laden comets from the Oort’s Cloud on their way towards the Sun. It also depends on what we do to the environment from where the viruses originally thrive without jumping into other animals and later to us humans. If we destroy their environments and homes such as the jungles or the animals that lives there that hosted them for hundreds of millions of years, they have no choice but to jump into the thriving human host of 7.8 billion people as of March 2020 living on this planet.
Alternatively some believe on the conspiracy in circulation claiming these viruses were actually man-made by Chinese and American scientists working together in collaboration at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or was it generated independently in China and in the United States as part of their bio-terrorists agenda that seriously went out of control? The true story we will never know.
REFERENCES:
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Footnote:
The above calculations are based on the following data: Diameter of Earth = 12,742 km (12,742,000 metres)
Diameter of Sun = 1,392,700,000 metres = (1.3927 million km) 1 light year = 9.461 x 1015 metres Speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s = 299792.458 km / s
One year = 3.154x10^7 seconds
Distance of Moon from Earth = 384,400 km Distance of Sun from Earth = 149.58 million km (1.4958x10^11 metres)
One Astronomical Unit = 1.496x10^8 km
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Basically I only want to know whether Covid-19 is lab *created* or not? Dr. Lim has answered well.
Remark by Mr. Stanley Ong (a mutual friend of both the author and the blogger):
Sun, May 3, 2020 at 3:42 PM (via WhatsApp)
Thanks, Lau.
If it is not lab created, then it is nature.
From here then I am interested in the *Origin* of Covid-19. Fort Dentrik Biochemical Lab in US or Wuhan Institute Of Virology? Then to find the 1st person infected from the original source - Patient Zero.
Then the word *discovered*. Covid-19 is discovered in Wuhan but it may not be the Origin.
It may take years to find the origin of Covid-19 and hence Patient Zero. I believe it is in US. Will US open its books and allow an independent body to investigate? This they will never allow but just to blame and blame China.
The facts are there. Circumstantial evidence and logical thinking is there to a conclusion as to the Origin of Covid-19, but difficult to prove unless US cooperates and clears its name..
(The blogger’s note: Stanley has written an interesting article entitled “The Truth - Shameless Blame Game and Conspiracies” and he has consented for the blogger to publish it soon after he does some editing.)
Labels: The Thoughts of Dr JB Lim
posted by taionn @ 1:09 PM
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