Abiogenesis is the spontaneous generation of life from nonliving material. For most scientists, this directly concerns the Archean Eon, a period approximately two point five billion years ago, when life supposedly first emerged. I am sure you are already aware of the famous Miller-Urey experiment, where they first succeeded in synthesizing organic compounds from an oxygen-free, high energy environment.
Never mind that the Archean was likely neither oxygen-free nor high energy. Never mind that decades later, scientists still cannot produce even half of the amino acids required for life. Never mind that laboratory conditions are not a substitute for an actual environment. Indeed, as my friend and colleague Harry Adams pointed out, the only thing the Miller-Urey experiment proved was that the conditions for abiogenesis were so absurdly specific that life should not have spawned at all.
I concurred with his conclusion. But as evolutionary scientists, there were precious few alternatives one could explore. The Panspermia Theory, that life originated from other planets through falling meteorites, was the next most credible option for a scientist who still wished to advance his career. But as Harry Adams again emphasized, all the theory did was kick the problem of organic synthesis down the road. Not only was this speculation foisting further absurd and specific requirements on an already precarious edifice, we never solved the original issue.
How did life spawn from inorganic material? Besides the laughable notion of creationism, there were no good answers. It was a troubling conundrum as our field and understanding of Earth’s history relied upon these increasingly dubious assumptions. I feared that even if someone had discovered the truth, the scientific community would be forced to reject it out of hand, or else abandon everything modern science had built.
The people would never trust us again. How could they? We could not trust ourselves again! How would we know we had it right this time? How would we know there would not be another century destroying revelation again? No! It was better to continue the lie—and pray—that somewhere down the road, our lies would turn into truth. Everyone, save for myself and Harry Adams, secretly accepted this line of thought.
But as for ourselves, we still had nowhere else to go. Harry believed it was only in re-examining our most foundational beliefs about the universe that we could find the faulty premise and finally uncover the truth. If we had to adopt ideas that were laughable to the scientific community, so be it. The scientific community had spent the past two centuries building their worldview on laughable ideas. At least for ourselves and those who would listen to us, we could come to a proper appreciation of the universe and draw the correct conclusion from the evidence laid out before us. That was where it all started.
I can’t recall when Harry came upon his eternalist theory. The first I heard of it was over dinner as an off-hand remark. It was a bizarre yet entertaining thought at first, to be dismissed out of hand when it came time for more serious conjecture. And yet, slowly, this theory began to enrapture him. Harry started broaching it more and more in our exchanges until he was adamant with me that this was the solution we were searching for.
He began making the strangest of arguments and rationalizations, citing authors and books as equally unorthodox as his peculiar view. One name mentioned frequently was a scientist, or more aptly occultist, Gregor Menkovitch. He worked in the Soviet Union as a biologist in the late eighties. From my own research, Menkovitch had accumulated a variety of eccentric habits, each more bizarre than the last. He was noted as only deigning to eat meat because he viewed plants as impure lower beings. He possessed and wore only one set of clothes at a time, burning his attire when it was time to discard them. Later in life, he had developed an acute paranoia of corners, insisting that both his living and work accommodations all had curved edges.
He would frequently attend seances to commune, not with ancestor spirits, as was vogue with those kinds of rituals, but with what he called a “primordial vitalist energy”. He perished in the early 2010s, but the details surrounding the death were strange. The autopsy declared he had died of liver failing from prolonged vodka abuse. And yet, in my independent research, I had discovered Gregor’s many ramblings about the evils of alcohol and how it dimmed the mind to “higher truths”.
I feel obligated to mention another piece of strange information that I still do not know where to place in this account. In 2013, there was apparently a biological response unit called to a Moscow apartment (both around the same time and location as Menkovitch’s death). The team had been called to investigate a body which had been discovered by concerned neighbors. There was no official documentation, only snippets I could gather and translate from online forums.
Sorting through the whirlwind of speculation and conspiracy from such sources, I could only sufficiently confirm two things. The first was that the incident had indeed happened, and second, that the photo being circulated was unaltered and original to the response team.
This photo, which drew all manner of speculation from the online frenzy, depicted three men in hazmat gear, taking samples from a body covered in strange translucent growths. The body could not be identified from the shot, and all my attempts to find further concrete facts on the matter had failed. I can only attribute my failure to one of two possibilities. Either I was not competent enough to find the foreign verifiable sources I was seeking, or, as the sometimes rightfully paranoid masses were claiming, the government had covered it up.
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