Did Life on other Planets originate from Earth?
George Dvorsky
2012-09-29 00:00:00
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It would now appear, however, that the film got this backwards: A newly discovered gravitational process called "weak transfer" indicates that the Earth was once capable of sending slow-moving, microbe-carrying rocks out of the solar system. As a result, astrobiologists are now wondering if our planet has spawned life elsewhere.

Escape velocity

Proponents of the panspermia hypothesis have spent most of their time trying to understand how an incoming object may have given rise to life on Earth. The basic idea is that a microbe-laden meteorite landed here billions of years ago, resulting in a kind of extraterrestrial genesis.

A fundamental problem with this theory, however, is how such a meteorite could make the journey from a neighboring solar system. According to the lithopanspermia theory, microorganisms may have been ejected into space after a planet suffered a cataclysmic impact with an asteroid, or by virtue of a powerful volcanic eruption. Most scientists don't contest this possibility — but what the pre-existing models have shown is that it is excruciatingly rare for microbe-laden ejecta to escape the gravity well of a solar system.



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