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Letter: 'Alien' plants are already among us (2)

Published 2 June 2021

From Eric Kvaalen, Les Essarts-le-Roi, France

To say “astronomers are in little doubt that a plant-filled planet exists beyond our solar system” may be going too far. A few years ago, speaking of how views on life elsewhere have changed since the 1960s and 70s, physicist Paul Davies said the prevailing view was that its emergence here was a bizarre fluke, an aberration, something that happened in one corner of the universe and simply wouldn’t happen elsewhere. The pendulum, he said, has now swung too far the other way.

The reason to doubt is that we have no theory of the origin of life.

Issue no. 3337 published 5 June 2021

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