14 DAY TRIAL // It is possible that life reached our planet from somewhere in outer space, a series of tests carried out by scientists at the University of Kent indicates.
The theory that life can travel from one planet to the other via meteorites is known to the scientific community as panspermia.
It basically states that fairly simple organisms such as yeasts and bacteria that originate on one planet can catch a ride on space rocks and thus travel to other parts of the universe.
Those who support this theory believe that this is how the Earth came to house life.
Those who disprove of it argue that, even if microorganisms on other planets would in fact jump on the back of a space rock and attempt traveling to Earth, they probably would not survive the journey, seeing how they would be exposed to both radiation and extreme temperatures.
Speaking at the European Planetary Science Congress in London, researcher Dina Pasini explained that, as surprising as this may sound, tests indicated that panspermia was possible.
The scientist said that, in order to test this theory, she and her colleagues used a two-stage light gas gun to fire frozen samples of a single-celled ocean-dwelling algae dubbed Nannochloropsis oculata into water.
This test simulated the conditions to which life forms would have been exposed while traveling through space and when crashing on our planet. Interestingly enough, some of the algae survived the experiment.
“As you might expect, increasing the speed of impact does increase the proportion of algae that die, but even at 6.93 kilometres per second, a small proportion survived. This sort of impact velocity would be what you would expect if a meteorite hit a planet similar to the Earth,” Dina Pasini said.
As far as radiation is concerned, the researcher theorizes that, as long as the life forms traveling from one planet to the other are embedded deep inside the space rock that is transporting them, they are quite safe.
Dina Pasini admits that her and her colleagues’ tests do not prove that panspermia is real and that life really did reach our planet from outer space. They only prove that this theory is plausible.
“Our research raises several questions. If we find life on another planet, will it be truly alien or will it be related to us? And if so, did it spawn us or did we spawn it? We cannot answer these questions just now, but the questions are not as farfetched as one might assume,” the scientists commented on the outcome of this series of experiments.