Professor William DeBoer, whom his students affectionately called “The Bore,” looked up at the large clock on the wall of the small, well-used lecture room. It was a far cry from the famous Richard P. Feynman Lecture Hall, a few doors away, but then again, so was DeBoer from the Nobel laureate Feynman.

  Fifteen minutes still. DeBoer sighed as the first students left the room for an early lunch break. And he also had more important things to do than deal with the ignorance of the remaining few. The newsletter he had read before the class was most intriguing. The La Silla Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert had detected a spectral shift on Proxima Centauri. Maybe it was just a sensor glitch, maybe more. It hadn’t made its way into the mainstream news, and honestly, why would it? But DeBoer desperately wanted to have a look at the raw data. Spectrography had always been his obsession, especially after his wife had left him for their church congregation’s retired pastor “to have some fun finally.” Whatever that meant, DeBoer didn’t care. Spectral data, though? He cared deeply.

  “So, what’s the significance of meteorite impacts for life on Earth?” DeBoer asked his last question for today evenly.

  “Apart from killing you if they hit you on the head?” a student asked.

  “Think more of the opposite,” DeBoer tried to guide them in the direction he wanted to go.

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  “But they killed the dinosaurs,” another one looked up from his smartphone.

  DeBoer nodded. “Yes, that’s a very likely hypothesis. One of the greatest extinction-level events on Earth.”

  “That’s not fair,” he heard another student call out.

  He looked around the room. “What?”

  “The poor dinosaurs! They didn’t ask for any of this,” the student began to sob.

  “I didn’t want to talk about the dinosaurs,” DeBoer answered, irritated.

  “What do you have against dinosaurs?!” another student jumped up and pointed his finger accusingly at DeBoer. “Is it because they’re extinct? Wow. Typical elitist academia bias.”

  “You’re a fucking speciecist!” another one chimed in.

  The student with the smartphone, who had started streaming the discussion a minute ago, was smiling serenely.

  “No!” DeBoer shouted in an unusual display of emotion and pounded on the wooden lectern. All eyes were on him, the room silent except for the occasional sobs from the pro-dinosaur camp.

  “What I meant is that the building blocks of life as we know it were probably brought to Earth by a meteorite . . . organic compounds . . . dropping into the primordial oceans.” DeBoer stopped, exasperated. He took a deep breath and collected his thoughts. “That all intelligent life was ultimately seeded by a celestial body falling from the sky. It’s called panspermia.”

  He looked around at faces that displayed a whole range of emotions, from disbelief and pure hatred to hesitant signs of agreement.

  “It’s called blasphemy,” a pale student in black clothes said solemnly from the corner, where he had sat silently for the last hour.

  DeBoer looked up at the ceiling, then the clock again. It was five minutes to twelve. “Okay, let’s wrap it up,” he said and grabbed his laptop from the lectern, silently contemplating faking his own death on the way out.