Life on Earth may have begun far from here. Some scientists think tiny microbes could have come from Mars, or even deeper space, traveling inside rocks blasted off planets by impacts.
Certain “extremophile” bacteria on Earth can survive cold, radiation, and no air. Microbes like these might endure a three-step journey: being blasted into space, drifting for millions of years, and crashing onto a new planet. They could survive by repairing damaged DNA or entering a deep sleep until conditions are safe again.
That raises a fascinating idea: humans and all life on Earth might belong to an ancient cosmic family tree. Other branches of that tree could include simple bacteria living under alien ice, microbes floating in thick atmospheres, or strange organisms adapted to worlds very different from ours.
If life truly travels between the stars, then the universe may not be full of strangers, but distant relatives waiting to be discovered.
“Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan) ‘all’ and σπέρμα (sperma) ‘seed’) is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe, distributed by cosmic dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and planetoids, as well as by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms, known as directed panspermia. The theory argues that life did not originate on Earth, but instead evolved somewhere else and seeded life as we know it.”
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