PANSPERMIA is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets and planetoids.
Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 1939) were influential proponents of panspermia.
In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic (containing carbon), which Wickramasinghe later proved to be correct.
I recall that being mentioned in science-fiction as the “Starseed”.