It was a few billion years ago when The Conveyors had first arrived. From some far flung arm of the galaxy they had been travelling for longer than any sentient being was capable of remembering. They sliced through the hellish void of the cosmos and pushed forth in all directions. Within their glittering frames they nurtured the most precious cargo in all the universe....When one of The Conveyors chanced upon a Yellow dwarf-type star, and around this an aquatic world, its automated system, for it had no pilot, told it to slow down. The Conveyor then plunged into the atmosphere of this new world. On crashing onto the surface it ejected the spoor that it contained onto the waters and the rocks. This, at last, was hope for a new start....
That scenario is, of course, science fiction. In a notorious exchange with the controversialist Ben Stein, however, a respected British ethologist said something that was to create shockwaves. He said:
`I could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the Universe, a civilisation evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto this planet. Now that is a possibility, an intriguing possibility`.
The speaker was speculating, but plummy voice, which tells of nannies and the dreaming spires of Oxford, belonged to one Richard Dawkins.
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