New Evidence For Extraterrestrial Origins of Life

According to recent research by an international team of scientists, there's new evidence that life may have arrived on this planet from elsewhere in the universe. They have shown that at least some primitive organisms could have survived a meteor ride and impact, possibly from Mars. To test the idea, scientists gathered colonies of micro-organisms including cyanobacteria, which live in rocky fissures, lichen, which smother their surfaces, and spores of the hardy bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and sandwiched them between slices of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock similar to that known to make up Martian meteorites. The researchers then used high explosives to fire a steel plate at the sandwiched organisms and after each shot transferred the microbes to a dish to see if any had survived. The shocks were equivalent to those suffered by Martian meteorites that have been found on Earth. To their surprise, the scientists found the lichen and bacterial spores survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts, proving at least that life could have arrived on this planet via a meteorite. Full Story