Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week we are joined from Sri Lanka by Dr. Chandra Wickramersing.

Dr Wickramersing's astronomy and astrobiology career stretching over many decades has taken him all over the world.

He has worked with, published and befriended some of the 20th century's leading space thinkers,

including the legendary Sir Fred Hoyle and Arthur C. Clark.

He joins us today to talk about pan-spermia, evolution and the origins of life on Earth.

Dr. Ickrama Singh, thank you very much for your time.

It's a pleasure meeting you. It's pleasure talking to you. Great.

Well, absolutely. And you probably may not be aware, but we have a traditional first question for first-time guests on the

podcast which is Dr. Wickramassing were you a weird kid?

I wouldn't have thought so.

I was weird in the sense that I was bookish and when my other

friends and so on used to go out and do silly things and so on I was reading my books so to that extent I was maybe you

could say odd a little bit odd so and what sort of books with a do you remember

any you have any early childhood books that you remember is being particularly transformative?

Well, I think I remember Alice in Wonderland, which is a really girl story. I thought it was a great story and it's the

author is called Louis Carroll. He was actually a math, really quite a distinguished

mathematician Don, who wrote these stories.

And so that's one of the stories.

But I also started on science fiction quite early in my sort of early teens

I was reading books like Arthur C. Cloud's novels and I got from other class really quite well after I came to

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