From time immemorial, humans have looked to the skies in search of their origins. The standard theory of biology – one that has prevailed in some form or other from the time of Aristotle in the 3 rd century BC - is that life must originate spontaneously from non-living material on the Earth. This so-called primordial soup theory has been challenged by evidence from the time of Louis Pasteur but it remained a cornerstone of modern ideas about life. Furthermore, it is often argued that the spread of life across the universe is impossible or extremely difficult.  However, from the 1980’s to the present-day evidence from astronomy, space exploration, extremophilic microbiology and geology have consistently pointed to the contrary: Astronomy and Biology are inextricably interlinked. The de novo origin of life from non-life involves super-astronomical improbabilities and could arguably have happened only once or a very few times in the history of the universe.  Once life originated in a cosmological context, however, its spread throughout the universe by means of panspermia, combined with the process of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), will be inevitable. These ideas were first presented to the scientific community at a conference in Maryland USA in the summer of 1970. A quarter of a century on with a wide range of interdisciplinary studies pioneered by the candidate the acceptance of the facts relating to our cosmic origins is inescapable. This would represent a revolution second only to the first scientific revolution spearheaded by Copernicus nearly half a millennium ago.