Misdirected Panspermia, Perhaps

Tue, Apr 11, 2006

A reference in the title there to F. Crick and L. E. Orgel’s “Directed Panspermia” (Icarus 19 [July 1973]: 341-346), mentioned in the same footnote as this “For the general idea of life on Earth having arisen from extraterrestrial activity [. . .] an idea also elaborated in the Strugatsky brothers’ [. . .] Roadside Picnic” (Steven J. Dick, The Biological Universe Cambridge, 1996. 377n104).

I’m not sure what Dick means here. I’m writing something short about Lem’s narrative theory, or presuppositions at least, in his brief essay on the book; but I thought briefly of the moulages being an advance unit that cause the rest of the world to be distorted into being, a temporal and stochastic paradox that may make sense of the Golden Ball.