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Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia
New submitter onyxruby writes "On December 29th of last year a comet exploded over Sri Lanka. When examined by Cardiff University one of the comet samples was found to contain micro-fossils akin to plankton. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center tested additional samples with similar results. The research paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology. In practice this means that the argument that life did not start on Earth has gained additional evidence."
Update: 03/12 16:59 GMT by S : On the other hand, Phil Plait says the paper is very flawed; the sample rocks the researchers tested may not even be meteorites.
Its just a piece of the earth's ocean that was blasted into space during the theoretical asteroid extinction event?
I have never heard of Panspermia being associated with Intelligent Design. I have heard people who believe in Intelligent Design shooting down Panspermia as some kind of new age nonsensical unscientific crap.
Basically, Panspermia solves the issue of the unlikelihood of life developing sporadically on Earth, by saying "Space did it", which is the scientific equivalent of "God did it".
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
But despite that, he is still probably right.
No, he is almost certainly wrong. It is plausible that a rock containing live microorganisms could be ejected from a planet during an asteroid strike, drift to another planet within the same solar system, land, and survive. But it is implausible that this mechanism could spread life through interstellar space. To eject a rock fragment with enough force to completely escape a solar gravity well would melt it. Once it was ejected from the solar system, it would take eons to reach another star system. Once it reached another system, it would have an infinitesimal chance of hitting a life supporting planet. It would be far more likely to fall into the star, hit a gas giant, or just orbit for a few billion years. The chance of this happening, even once, in the lifetime of the universe, is remote. The chance of it happening repeatedly, in some sort of chain reaction, is as close to zero as anything can get.
I know! Everyone is right! You see, life started on Earth, but then a giant meteor smashed into earth, which happened to send some rocks into space that had bacteria on them. That meteor was so big, it wiped out all life on Earth, so years later when some of those rocks landed back on Earth, they became the source of all life we see today.
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