A staggering new story from
The Express claims that coronavirus has most likely come to Earth on a meteorite. Speaking to astrobiologist Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, the web post claims that a
fireball that burnt up in northern China last October is the most likely source, despite there having been no reports of meteorites found on the ground.
Panspermia is the theory that organisms trapped in meteorites can establish themselves on a planet they crash into, provided the meteorite doesn't burn up completely and the organism can withstand the conditions on the ground. These meteor-surfing extremophiles are theorized to be able to survive the harsh conditions of space, something that has only so far been seen in tardigrades within the animal kingdom. But what about viruses?
“The most compelling evidence that SARS-CoV-2 didn’t come from a meteorite is that it is so closely related to other known coronaviruses,” Dr Dominic Sparkes, a specialist in infectious diseases, told IFLScience. “It’s closely related to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus that caused an outbreak in the early 2000s and the MERS (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome) virus which still causes disease currently.”
For the SARS-CoV-2 virus to have come from a meteorite, it would have to have evolved in perfect tandem to these known coronaviruses to share so many of their characteristics. Meteorites are often fragments of asteroids that have remained unchanged for billions of years, so it would seem immensely unlikely that, suspended in the harsh conditions of space, a virus could have evolved to look exactly like two terrestrial coronaviruses.