Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars' (opens in new tab)

I have this vision of dinosaur astronauts, clinging to the rock that has been ejected into space, on their way to Mars to establish a new life there.

I have always found the pan-spermia theories interesting. It still doesn't answer the 'where first' question but it allows for many places to share similar lifeforms without requiring a recreation of an improbable event in all of them. Of course it would be really weird if the universe was populated in this way with humanoids, and the original Star Trek was closer to the truth than not :-)

> "Even using conservative, realistic estimates... it's still possible that organisms could be swimming around out there in the oceans of Europa," she said.

    ALL THESE WORLDS
    ARE YOURS EXCEPT
         EUROPA
       ATTEMPT NO
     LANDING THERE

Even if organisms got ejected with rocks, wouldn't they just die frozen or from radiation on the long journey thru the vacuum?

I don't believe this story! Why don't we find those rocks ejected during the impact on Moon?

The notion that an asteroid impact could launch life-bearing debris to escape velocity is not new. I remember it being mentioned in one of Lester Del Rey's juvenile science fiction books -- possibly "Outpost of Jupiter", which according to Wikipedia was first published in 1963.

Panspermia[1] is not a new theory. This whole article is highly speculative. It might sound compelling, but we just know way too little to make any sort of prediction on this matter. Any real findings must come from actual data provided by probes and landers such as the Mars 2020 Rover[2] and the ExoMars[3] mission.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020_rover_mission

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExoMars

How likely is it for these organisms to survive ejection in the first place? I thought asteroid impacts were incredibly hot and violent.

So basically, if a planet has no dominant/intelligent species capable of protecting itself; not only nature resets that planet; it scatters the building blocks of life to other planets as well in the process.

Billions of years forward. Intelligent life on multiple planets from same building blocks. They fight for dominance in a new natural selection. This time to see which planet was conducive for creating better lifeforms.

What if life on earth was also just a fragment of another past planet?

For anyone who is interested in the Dinosaur asteroid, may I suggest listening to or watching the latest RadioLab, which went into some interesting (speculative) depth about what may have happened.

This article is ridiculous. They have a theory and a model that says, for example, that 6 chunks of rock hit Europa. Of course we don't know that they did! This is unfalsifiable twaddle.

This is interesting primarily because we know a decent amount about the nature of the Chicxulub impact event, so we can model it. And in doing so we've found that it should be possible for microbial life deep inside Earth rocks to end up in heliocentric orbits and to be protected from space radiation long enough to have a reasonable chance of surviving until the rock they are in hits another planetary body in our Solar System.

What this actually means, though, is that likely many other impact events in Earth's history could have done the same thing. Even going back billions of years. Which means that the probability of Earth life having landed on Mars, Venus, or Europa in a way which might have seeded locations favorable to life is very much non zero.

This sort of thing has been speculated about before but never modelled so rigorously using real-world impacts as examples.