Saturday, March 21, 2020

War of The Worlds : Corona viruses or The Human Race?


Dear all in this WhatsApp Chat and Other Readers 


I would like to ask a question about this corona virus invasion on Earth.


The question is down below.


But before that, let me give you some information to mull  about the size and numbers of this virus:


The size of viruses can range from about 20 to 400 nanometres in diameter (1 nanometre = 10^-9 meters).


The corona viruses have a genome size of approximately 27 to 34 kilobases which is the largest among known RNA viruses (1).  


The estimated size of Covid19 is about 300 nanometer or 3 x 10 -7 meters (0.0,000,003 metres) based on an estimated calculation I made


(The smallest bacteria are about 400 nanometres in size)


The Radius of Earth is 6.371 million metres

Hence surface area of Earth is A = 4πr2 = 5.1 x 10^14 square metres (510.1 trillion m²).


Suppose we now  assume the present Covid19 began to invade the entire surface of Earth either by:


1.       By human-to human transmission as most virologists believe, or  


2.       By seeding from comet’s debris coming from the Oort’s Cloud beyond the Solar System between 0.03 to 3.2 light-years away from the Sun as proposed by Sir Fred Hoyle and Nobel Prize Laureate Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 1939) who showed the correlation between the passage of comets near the vicinity of Earth and influenza pandemic on Earth.


This was also theorized by Steven Hawking.  All 3 of them were world-renown scientists from the University of Cambridge.


They contended that life forms continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere, and may be responsible for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases, and the genetic novelty necessary for macroevolution in an Origins Symposium presentation on April 7, 2009 (2).


In such a scenario we can expect the entire Earth surface will be peppered by:


5.1 x 10^14 / 3 x 10 -7 meters = 1.7 x 10^21 (17 followed by 20 zeros) corona viruses
The reference human body has a surface area of about 1.9 m^2


This means there will be a minimum of 1.9 / 3 x 10-7 = 6 million viruses covering over the outer part of  our body alone if they rained down from us  from space, rather than transmitted by human-to-human social contacts (assuming the surface area of corona viruses is about the same as its total linear size of 0.0,000,003 metres).


Translated to the world’s population of 7.8 billion (7800 million), this means if everyone is covered on the outside of his  body alone without the viruses  entering into his or her body to multiply, there will be:


4.68 x 10^16 Covid19 over the entire human body on Earth, or 2.75 X 10-3 % (0.0027 %) of what the entire Earth gets if the spread continues


Having now given you all the calculations and the info


My question now is:


Who is going to win the War of the Worlds?


1.       The human race with our preventive and advanced technology or

2.       The tiny, tiny, tiny Coronavirus invading Earth from Outer Space


Give us your thoughts. This is a question based on the Survival of the Fittest by Natural Selection as an extension of Charles Darwin’s theory on:

The Origin of the Species


(when I did my postdoctoral further education course on Evolution and the Mystery of Life at Cambridge, and later on Astronomy at Oxford, and later back again to Cambridge to complete my course in Forensic Toxicology, these were the typical type of forum questions assigned in their tens of dozens in every  course by both universities  for  us  students to answer

They just want to test our analytical and intellectual ability). 


Let’s see how we tackle this question I ask in return


Share with us your thoughts. It can be fun

Thank you 


Lim jb  



References:

2.       Fred Hoyle; Chandra Wickramasinghe & John Watson (1986). Viruses from Space and Related Matters. University College Cardiff Press.

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