Neil deGrasse Tyson

I think no one knew how to do that until we can computer model major impacts on planetary surfaces that can then fling rocks back into space.

And you couldn't just deduce that.

You had to calculate what happens to the energy of the impactor and how it gets manifested.

So in all fairness to the ignorant physicist, computers helped us out there.

to the cocky physicist.

By the way, just further in your defense, one of our greatest physicists, Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin temperature scale, was telling geologists, geologists said, look, we need a billion years to make these ravines.

We need a billion years.

And the biologists were saying, we need a billion years to evolve everything.

And he was saying, I'm only giving you

10 million years, because that's the lifetime of the sun.

And there's no way we can make the sun live longer than that.

And so then he got his ass handed to him when we discovered that there's thermonuclear fusion in the sun.

And there's a whole other thing that was discovered after he made this proclamation.

But he had the cockiness of a physicist, knowing that physics is pretty fundamental.

So my issue with panspermia is if you can make amino acids on rocks in space or in the parent body from which it came,

You can make amino acids on Earth without the rock.

Earth has got all the same ingredients and then some.

So this urge to appeal to panspermia, for me, seemed less urgent.

The urge was less urgent when I look at it that way.

But maybe the argument in favor of it is it is really, really hard to make life.