Comets spread Earth-life around galaxy, say scientists

Cardiff University ^ | 10 February 2004 | Staff

[steve-b]

Stars are not fixed in space.

[American_Centurion]

In order to infect 10,000 million systems in the period of life 65 million years we would have to on average pass within 15 light years of 153 new stars each and every year.

And that is averaging the size of the bio-disc. In reality for the first third of the period of life star systems would have to be so close to meet that average that we would very likely have been caught with another star to form a binary system.

[DManA]

Sometimes science answers questions, but you'd never know it from what passes as science reporting.

[DManA]

Or, you could say every person born is an unbelievable winner

"It's hard to believe he beat out 2 million other sperm?" .

[Semper Paratus]

Maybe Comets brought life to Earth instead.

[Chris Talk]

Nothin from Nothin, yields nothin...

All Life comes from prior Life.

Life is everywhere, for God is life, and God is everywhere.

[LibWhacker]

Professor Napier finds that collisions with interplanetary dust will quickly erode the ejected boulders to much smaller fragments . . .

Why is the asteroid belt still there then? I think panspermia is highly likely, but there seems to be something wrong with this part of the theory.

[Lady Composer]

Very interesting reading!

[PatrickHenry]

Why is the asteroid belt still there then?

I donno. Perhaps they are relatively recent. The rings of Saturn, on the other hand, are rather finely pulverized. Someone around here has the most current info. Be patient.

[LibWhacker]

I think he must mean that the ejected boulders will quickly begin to erode away, not that they will quickly erode away completely, as I initially interpreted it.

[Snerfling]

and God is everywhere

You just gotsta believe!

[PatrickHenry]

Yeah. I assume they mean that little fragments, chipped away from the big chunk, will drift away. The main boulder could hold together for a long time.

[Physicist]

Well, the idea is testable. The atmosphere of Jupiter surely contains some climates capable of supporting some Earth organisms. Those regions should be literally rotten with Earth bacteria by now. Once we find them, we should be able to determine how long ago they branched off.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Grut]

Svante Arrenhius, please call the office!

[RightWhale]

Stars are not fixed in space.

Oh? Then what keeps them from falling on us? Granted, some do.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[ASA Vet]

Stars are not fixed in space

Of course not! They're towed to a "star repair shop."

[Calvin Locke]

Whether anything could survive...

NASA brought back parts of an unmanned Moon probe and revitalized the bacteria found on it.
(errantly contaminated before it was sent - yeah, right...)

[Junior]

*Yes, I know, there is no reason why, given common microbial DNA sources, other planets wouldn't produce newer life forms. It just leaves the possibility of a human-type life form that much more possible.

Think about this, though. If another line of life had arisen in the galaxy, it would most likely be subjected to the same bombardment/ejection as life on our planet. Some of those spores would have conceivably made their way here, if as the article states, our spores have made it to 10 billion other systems. If this were the case, we would probably see completely unrelated lines of life here on Earth. That we don't speaks to the possibility that life arose once in this part of the galaxy and that any life we might come across will be related to us in one way or another...