I always wondered why there is is much resistance to the idea of lab leak and why the origin of a virus is this political. My conclusion is that this topic happens to go to the root some very important disagreements we are having as a culture.
At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".
If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.
But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.
It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.
What scientific problem would actually be solved by panspermia? Obviously, the product of two unlikely events is not more likely than one unlikely event by itself.
Not to mention, we have zero evidence that comets can really seed life and we also have absolutely no reason to believe that any place in the universe is better at spawning life than earth.
We've got goldilocks conditions here on earth for creation of complex chemistries and emergence of life.
We've got all sorts of chemical elements, nice warm distance from the sun - lots of energy, but not too much to destroy things. Lots of liquid water, getting stirred up by a moon. A hot molten core providing both geothermal energy and a magnetic radiation shield. Plenty of lightening to initiate higher energy reactions...
Does it get an better ?
All those chemicals, getting mixed in water, stirred up by tides and thermal currents, heated up by the sun, are going to react ... no way to stop them.
In a few decades of trying a small number of labs experimenting with early earth type conditions have already been able to see organic chemicals created out of inorganic .. the building blocks of life, so imagine how common this would have been on early earth itself, with billions of micro environments chemically evolving 24x7 for millions of years ...
It's hard to say what we should regard as the beginnings of evolution, but this type of ever changing, ever complexifying stage of emerging organic chemistry on earth - essentialy an inevitability - could even be considered as the start.
> we have zero evidence that comets can really seed life
I would argue that this isn't precisely true. We know of some forms of relatively complex terrestrial life that can survive for indefinite (as far as we know) periods in vacuum - tardigrades are the most common example given.
> What scientific problem would actually be solved by panspermia? Obviously, the product of two unlikely events is not more likely than one unlikely event by itself.
Panspermia is the belief that life is pervasive across the Universe. You don't have to believe that to believe that terrestrial life may not have originated here. From a statistically perspective, if we assume that life has arisen exactly once, it's no less likely that it arose on Mars as on Earth. Maybe some or all of the early history of life had already happened before the accretion of Earth. If that's the case, we'll likely never find direct evidence of it.
In short... I'd argue that panspermia doesn't "solve" any problems at all. If life is unique to Earth, we should be able to find evidence of its earliest forms. If it originated on Mars and was "seeded" here, then we should eventually find that evidence there. If it's universal, it still had to have originated _somewhere_; it's just going to be much more difficult to discover where.
To the best of my (lay) understanding, while we have a fair idea of how life might have began, we don't have very good evidence that it actually began on Earth.
* There exists evidence suggestive of life that is ~3.8b years old, in the form of what we believe to be precipitate from a oceanic hydrothermal vent that shows signatures of biological processes.
This means that in order for life to have arisen on Earth, it must have done so in the first ~1b years - because those oldest fossils mentioned above included multicellular life. To go from "primordial soup" to "multicellular microorganisms" is a pretty big leap, and we don't know the specifics.
Then there's the fact that _all_ known life either contains DNA or, in the case of RNA viruses, requires access to DNA-based life to reproduce. We don't know what came before that. Did primitive metabolism in come first, or genes (encoding structure in a durable and reproducible way)? Did they arise in tandem?
Either way, we are very confident that 1b years after the matter that we now know as Earth coalesced, there were multicellular organisms alive. Since all known life requires DNA, that means DNA was around at that point as well. That doesn't seem long enough to me, and apparently others share that intuition.
One hypothesis is than the RNA predate DNA and even cells. Imagine a soup of RNA strings who replicate themselves. That said, this auto-replicating RNAs did not have been find on earth. Even an auto-replicating RNA is already too complex to be the fist steep. There may have been pre-RNA auto replicating molecules like TNA (not actually found too).
A path like:
(pre-TNA world ?) -> (TNA world ?) -> RNA world -> Ribonucleoprotein world -> Simple cells & viruses with DNA & RNA
It's one of the steeps before the cells than may have come from outer space because we did not find trace of them on earth.
The other hypothesis is than they have disappear since then, because of later steeps in life history like the Great Oxidation Event.
The main thrust of the comments here seems to be defending against the idea that Yeltsin was genuinely surprised. It's sad to me because this indicates that the main lessons from this very dark period of "real existing socialism" haven't been learned. Oh well, maybe next time!
JavaScript is really just the tip of the iceberg or maybe the perfect embodiment of modernity.
Looking at it narcissisticly, it's like some kind of divine punishment for younger me who couldn't wait for progress and innovation on basically everything.
At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".
If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.
But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.
It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.