The following is my translation of an article called: 'Der Ursprung des Lebens III' von Wilhelm Bölsche. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1910, Heft 6, Seiten 210-215. I'm not aware of any previous translation. Part I Part II.
Trevor Dykes.

The origin of life (part 3) by Wilhelm Bölsche
Hypotheses have much value in research. They do not only provisionally make the dark gaps more lively, but they also lessen the fear and enable confident progress. They provide the first signposts through chaos and have worth as scouts. This means it is necessary that they should also be recognised as following a certain logical law. The real hypothesis is a form of short, primary though based upon a couple of well ordered indices which have a certain amount of strength, but do not amount to being conclusive evidence. The primary shot is delivered in the hope that missing information may subsequently come to hand, and point in the same direction.

In contrast to this is a hypothesis that rests upon indices that are also hypotheses, as that carries the danger of attempting to justify the unsupported. A common mistake for the inexperienced is to believe that such a route already leads to genuinely scientific hypotheses. For example, I have seen an almost steady flow of attempts to account for the Ice Age coming from lay circles over the years, often careful and industrious work, but they always stumble over this same stone. Question: how did it come to pass, that the Earth of the Diluvian period came to suffer from a general climatic decline? Answer: I assume this was due to something or other in the cosmological circumstances, a colder area of space or the presence of a dark object between the Sun and the Earth, which periodically blocks the Sun, or something similar. However, from such changes in the temperature, what do we know of such a body beyond nothing whatsoever? "Well, I assume there was one; and that explains everything!" It is always necessary to be warned against this dangerous sort of conclusion, especially when one believes in the high value of firmly built hypotheses, and enjoys the excitement they offer.

Let us consider Arrhenius' idea from this perspective, that the radiation pressure could drive living spores of bacteria from planet to planet, star to star. Firstly, we have a number of indices which are obviously not hypothetical, but rather are based on secure ground.

We are all aware how small bacteria are. When we think of the clearest air and the bluest sky, then it is already self-evident to the academics of today that there could be invisible, tiny bits of bacterial dust there, bacteria in a state of so called spores, like dried seeds, encapsulated with life drifting in a truly dust-like form which, in favourable conditions in a suitable place, could be reawakened to life and reproduction with their stored energy. If we think of the smallest of the small from this dust population of bacterial spores within range of our possibilities of magnification, reaching the space beyond our atmosphere between planets, it is clear that they may fall under the influence of radiation pressure to some degree, and be moved. This organic dust containing the mysterious cells of life, which are affected by the lightest breeze, would be forced by light waves into the free ocean of the ether. Precisely as is known to occur with captured cosmic droplets or meteor dust, with the density of water and a diameter of an astonishing five- or six-thousandth of a millimetre, they would be driven from the orbit of the Earth to that of Mars within three weeks and, after fourteen months, reach the orbit of Neptune.

Imagining that the individual lifespans of such minute single cells could be more than weeks, or even months, may seem counterintuitive. But there are enough wondrous single-celled organisms on our Earth which, despite all their microscopic smallness, in no way share the fate of one-day flies, as we might imagine for such small beings. Single-cellers of this minute size include, for example, the male sperm of higher animals, and yet such sperm cells typically survive in the womb of the female bats from autumn, when they arrive, until March or April, which is when the actual fertilisation of the female egg takes place, and the queen bee hosts such Lilliputian cells of life in the form of sperm for three to four years. That dried bacteria including the harmful, for example the infamous causer of typhoid and anthrax, also similarly survive for years is long known to medicine from bitter experience.

But light pressure would be driving these enduring flecks with their organic content through a vacuum beyond all moisture into space! And they would be driven into a terrible cold of at least -200°C.

But we also know: Life on this Earth is infinitely adaptable under all possible conditions, and it is the bacteria, especially in their enduring form as spores, which are best able to survive shortages of moisture and extreme cold. But adaptation in this case would be in entirely unearthly conditions! For this theory to be credible, these germs of life must be able to endure for more than a couple of minutes in a cold of -200°C. Our own experiments, however, have punished our lies of expected probability. MacFadyen placed anthrax spores into liquid oxygen (at a temperature of -190°C), and it did not kill them; he subjected them to temperatures reaching -252°C in liquid hydrogen for ten hours -and they survived. Arrhenius himself even reports of 20 hours, and even six months and longer, by -200°C. These terrible temperatures were slept through -but they did not result in death.

As one has now become accustomed to these no longer disputed facts, it does not seem particularly remarkable that, is a similar state of sleep, bacterial spores, and also seeds of higher plants and algae, can survive weeks and months of absolute dryness in drying chambers combined with concentrated sulphuric acid and airlessness in vacuums. The facts of this are simply enormously monstrous. Even the craftiest and most unscrupulous of hypothesis-smiths would not have dared to invent such things as supporting hypotheses. But Arrhenius did not require any more hypothetical material, rather he built upon recognised science.

Naturally enough: his meteor dust, travelling with radiation pressure, should reach the system of Alpha centauri, the nearest fixed star, after some 9,000 years. And now he wants to include bacterial spores. A spore of bacteria should live for 9,000 years! That is the decisive element of this hypothesis; the rest stands with only a couple of relatively minor complications. Gaston Bonnier summarised some arguments not all too long ago in this journal, and they spoke against the notion of such lifespans here on Earth. That some organisms can hibernate through such incredible lengths of time and dryness is an old assumption, which undoubtedly partially belongs in the field of biological myths. The toad, entombed in rock, which survived for hundreds of thousands of years, the revitalized Eocene vegetation and the like, are today as credible as the famous wheat of the mummies. For that last case, and in contradiction of Herr Bonnier, I would like to point out that a recent, serious German textbook of natural history still offering this fairy tale a place does not, as far as I am aware, exist. The strongest evidence for a relatively vast lifespan can still be provided, as earlier, by certain ancient trees. Even with those, we find earlier estimates being revised somewhat downwards. Of baobabs, which reach 5,000, or with the famous Drachenbaum of Humboldt's from Orataya, reportedly even 6,000 years of age, one today speaks of less, although 3,000 years does remain plausible for some cypresses and Eiden. However, a tree can only be spoken of as an individual to a limited degree; it is really a colony of countless generations of shoots, and provides a closer analogy with a body of coral. One also has to consider the reproductive viability of the organisms which, as far as we know, is naturally limitless; all higher life of today is in all probability descended in succession from organisms of the oldest prehistoric sea and, in this sense, that is a hundred million years or more; but that is not what came into consideration for Arrhenius. For him, only a narrower argumentation can be significant.

What makes the story of undiminished vitality for wheat seeds, after thousands of years in the graves of Egyptian mummies, so improbable, is the nature of the storage without any sort of special reserves. When conservation is simply left to chance, then an old spore of moss, after a century with its dried plant, may well be cleanly and nicely grown in a herbarium, but things do not go further that that as there are too many possibilities for physical and chemical changes. Thus far is Herr Bonnier completely correct. What we do not yet actually know, however, is how a plant seed or, above all, a bacterial spore would behave if consequently subjected to -200°C in an experiment over thousands of years, in absolute dryness and under vacuum. There is an undeniable possibility that, if it could survive in such conditions of coldness and aridity for years, then an endless chain of years could also see it unchanged, and that would mean viable. Arrhenius has come forward with a relevant calculation as some evidence. He assumes a progressive loss of vitality in an organic cell with a chemical process as the cause, and postulates this occurs more slowly at lower temperatures than higher ones. An increase in the temperature of 10°C raises the relationships of life functions from 1 to 2.5. The cold of space in the area of the orbit of Neptune is thought to be -220°C, and that would reduce life processes to a thousand millionth of their strength at 10°C and, if so, less energy would be expended in three million years than during a single day at 10°C. According to this calculation, a bacterial spore transported by radiation pressure could stroll to Sirius, Arcturus, and even much further, without finding its death. This is naturally a purely hypothetical conclusion. However, there is something of interest in the thing with a certain attractiveness, and it is not entirely built of thin air. With time, it will be possible to experimentally test this mode of thought, and that could produce serious indices.

Meanwhile, the main hypothesis has another aspect which appears somewhat loose. This is namely how bacterial spores would actually escape from our earthly atmosphere (or that of another suitable planet) and reach into the ethereal space. This would sometimes have to happen for the light journey to begin in earnest. Tiny spores certainly reach heights and are taken up even by air movements. But the border for this appears to be in the lower depths of the air ocean. Arrhenius thinks beyond this due to the repulsive energy of electricity. This would be in the area where, according to his opinion, discharges of negative electrically loaded cosmic dust (in this case originating from the Sun) produce the familiar northern lights. A whirl of spores could come into this critical region from below, become electrically charged, and the opposing field could redirect them into empty space.

This element of Arrhenius' otherwise sharply focused line of thought necessarily rests upon the northern lights hypothesis, a hypothesis indeed, but at least it has not been invented for this purpose, and it does have many advocates. The intensive repulsion force in the upper regions of our atmosphere has been experimentally calculated by other renowned researchers before him. Wilhelm Förster sought to explain the strange zodical light, a particular ball at dawn which has no solid explanation, as a weak 'comet's tail' produced by the Earth and consisting of tiny repulsed articles from the upper atmosphere. However, in such circumstances, most bacterial spores thrown up with the dust would be evaporated. Pulling this is by the hair would be no help in this case.

All in all, it cannot be denied: with Arrhenius' idea of bacterial transport and bacterial exchange in space, we have a shot of thought which is to be taken seriously, but which does not yet have the power of evidence from facts, but it does follow otherwise orderly rules to a more than sufficient degree.

What would be the most interesting aspect, however, is not possible departures and further migrations of earthly spores into space, but rather the opposite, such seeds arriving here from world bodies other than our Earth. We have the seriously proposed possibility that the actual place of origin for life may have lain somewhere far off in space, and that this life could have come to us as a belated import.

There is a grave difficulty here, as experimental evidence showing such alien spores would be immensely difficult to find. We would have great difficulties in recognising a signature of a bacterial spore showing it to be of cosmic, and not earthly, origins. Kurd Laßwitz has recently attempted to show in a highly amusing way with direct connections to Arrhenius, in a fantasy book worthy of reading (Sternentau, die Pflanze vom Neptuns Mond -'Star dew, the plant from Neptune's moon'), how one such higher crypto-cell could perhaps look like, and from which a previously unknown earthly lifeform could develop (in this fantasy instance, the being has a generational change between plant and animal). Something like that would certainly wake our attention, but it is presently only an idea in a novel. Should we today discover a very curious new animal, no zoologist would so simply leap to the conclusion, that it must be an import from Venus or Mercury.

On the other hand, something would already have been achieved if we were able to say with certainty, that organic life exists on other world bodies. Presently, we cannot do so with absolute certainty, so this is strongly still in the stage of a scientific hypothesis.

Many general probabilities suggest that other planets do carry life, but a strict basis in fact is not available; and, in order to have an analogy, we must first have a precise knowledge of what life is; and, in order to support this through observation, we must be able to vastly improve our vision. Arrhenius himself recently declared in this journal that Mars is a "without doubt dead world", and that despite the hopes of many in this regard. Personally, I would not fully concur with his highly intelligent explanations in this instance. For example, when he assumes that the canals of Mars are valleys from earthquakes based on an analogy with glowing systems on the surface of the Moon, and that these systems are also valleys filled with light coloured dust, then he is explaining something not understood with something else not understood; as the glowing lines of the Moon, which look like a glimmering varnish across all uneven surfaces of the ground by a full moon, are actually completely unexplained in reality. A few aspects of his image of Mars, with its red deserts and salt swamps, are also reminiscent of, rather than the future, the past situation on our own Earth in around the Permian and Triassic to geologists; despite deserts and salt steppes, the Earth hosted a rich animal life. But it is known that the hypothesis of life on Mars is now swaying in an unsteady mist; there is no secure basis for it, and the sceptics are correct.

In contrast, I find something else of importance which Arrhenius has not called upon, something which is within our earthly control and, in a sense, is of consequence beyond our Earth.

Why, if they are simply a product of our Earth and are bound with it for eternity, have our bacteria attained their strange characteristics enabling them to withstand degrees of cold and extreme aridity and air shortages, conditions which do not occur here? Does it not look as if they have really adapted to our earthly conditions?

In the sense of Darwin, all organic adaptations eventually serve a purpose, even if only temporarily. Why have we here got a spectrum of adaptations which practically go far beyond the demands set by our earthly theatre?

One could take this question further. There are a number of forms among our bacteria which cannot only remain dormant as spores, but which also appear to show capabilities which are extremely odd, at least for our Earth, but which must be highly advantageous for sustaining life in differently constructed worlds. There are known bacteria that use certain amounts of sulphur dioxide for their normal organic processes, a substance which is generally poisonous for organisms. There are so called anaerobic bacteria which cannot tolerate the oxygen in air, and depend upon purely chemical oxygen from mineral substances. If our Earth were to be treated with a dose of sulphur dioxide, sufficient to immediately kill all other life forms (as certain Jeremiahs have predicted for chemical poisoning delivered to the Earth from contact with the tails of comets), or if the atmosphere were to suddenly thin down until comparable to that of the Moon, we would all asphyxiate, -only sulphur and anaerobic bacteria would allow life to continue and perhaps to develop to higher forms over the eons, possibly again rising to intelligent beings from the original forms of prehistory, and this life would be consequently adapted for sulphur dioxide rich of airless conditions. The implicated conclusion is close, that life here shows the hidden possibility of surviving beyond our Earth in the oxygen poverty of moons, or on planets with strange atmospheres.

This allows us to think of the greater 'Third Kingdom' among our bacteria, with their curious opposites shown in connection with composition and further development of an extreme stability here and an adaptability there. Parts of the single-celled stock developed long ago, through countless generations, to animals and plants, with their particular characteristics for earthly existence and exploitation. Another part has stubbornly remained in largely its original condition till today, as a society which, while certainly hardy, is also sterile in this regard, and indifferent to the possibilities of development. While the rest of earthly life forms have adapted increasingly in accord with each other, and a certain harmony has been established (we can simply think of our bodies as peaceful associations with division of labour and assistance), we can also see a group of malignants engaged in a terrible and constant war of destruction against this earthly friendship, the battle of bacteria, in which our medicine today has become engaged with great energy, and is working ever further with gathering excitement as to whether it will achieve victory. Are these sterile and hostile possibilities of life embodiments of those which, under other planetary conditions, may well have achieved mastery?

On the other hand, the energy still maintained by the more developed earthly life is astonishing, a great extravagance that makes our own Earth effectively appear almost unearthly. One can think of the deep sea, where even highly developed life forms from our upper world, such as fish and crabs, have been able to adapt to an environment with the pressure of 1,000 atmospheres, in freezing cold with a pronounced content of carbon dioxide, and sunk in an eternal night. Who would assume, that if we were to discover a distant planet with such pressure, such temperature and such darkness, that this planet could support life? And yet, the adaptive possibilities are there: they are even present in the small elite of the earthly advanced stages of up to a fish, indeed (as humans are also now pressing into this milieu of the deep sea) even to the level of a person. One also thinks of animals which internally generate heat while polar winter reigns outside, and of glowing moss which concentrates light through a form of burning lens within the cells, and can collect enough light in a half dark fissure to power its chlorophyll cuisine, - -and one sense, I think, that in this "life", whatever that is, is generally found something of astronomical diversity that could develop far beyond the usual level of this Earth, and all forms could become exceptional. One senses something universal in a speck of a spore, and one would not wish to conclude that it alone couldn't simply take advantage of opportunities offered by its role in the whole wide theatre of this wondrous thing, that which is called life, and it must have caused great changes since the moment of its beginning.

Simply, naturally, put concisely: already, in the simplest stage of a bacteria, life had a magic ring, and this allows it to react and endure.

Should it appear that life is a strong universal movement in the sense of Arrhenius' hypothesis, present everywhere, then this would suggest an adaptation to cosmic chains far beyond just this Earth, and it would be probable that the origin of life lay elsewhere in the cosmos. But where are the intermediaries? Is not the inside of each planet also a typical representative of the cosmos, from which this flower can blossom when the hour strikes, although always of which only part of its whole energy can develop in accordance with the precise conditions? Or does the real nursery lie in some particularly favourable place with a particular concentration of elemental cosmic energy, and has since been constantly spreading as seeds from there on waves of radiation through space, conquering the spaces between the stars where, meanwhile, other causes have produced balls of material, such as the young Earth, for this eternal colonisation and, as on Earth, in line with the possibilities towards higher intelligence?

That the original possibilities for origins could differ in strength cannot be denied. The visible universes already contains endlessly large, and endlessly small, potentials for spreading and concentrating material. A glowing speck of mist, containing perhaps only a billionth of the density of our air, or a star which is many times larger than our own, and which retains all its inner material via pressure, a planet whose commonest element has the power of our radium: who would want to think of such possibilities without accepting, that the wondrous qualities found in the incomprehensibly small volumes of our tiniest bacterial spores, which may result from cosmic conditions, could not perhaps make the fantastic history of our Earth appear a comparatively very mundane and small episode. Who might sometimes not say this. But who, who will prove it...?

Note: This is part three of a three part article. Go to: Part 1, Part 3.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.