Space May Be Filled With Germs

I just read an article talking about how life may be able to survive travel between planets.

OK, that's nothing new. We've been talking about panspermia for a long time. I can easily envision a microbe getting blasted into space and going dormant being lucky enough to survive falling onto a new world.

Reason I'm posting is that I just had a fresh idea. What if life isn't totally dormant in space. There should be a fairly wide zone around the sun where conditions are balanced enough for it to be warm enough for life to thrive. Since this zone would be a spherical area hundreds if not thousands of miles thick the three dimensional area would be vast indeed. There would be plenty of room for all kinds of things to happen.

I've always been concerned about the origins of life. The first life on Earth was from a class called Extremophiles. They're hearty little critters that can survive in very extreme conditions. They're hardly the creatures I would envision developing in a warm pond somewhere. Maybe life originated in space. It could explain a lot of questions.

Here's the article that prompted my thinking.
Source

Fans of extraterrestrial life may have been disappointed when internet-fed rumors of Martian life ended in a NASA press conference on soil composition. But they can take solace in a newly popular theory that suggests the rest of space may teem with microbes. This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria. "Studies have shown that microbes can survive the shock levels of being launched into space," said Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University. "And as more and more organisms are discovered under extreme conditions, it's become more plausible that things could survive in space for the time it takes to go from one planet to another."

EDIT - Actually, the article goes on the make suggestions that follow my thinking. I started posting after reading the first part. I just got around to reading the rest.

[edit on 6-8-2008 by LazyGuy]

reply to post by LazyGuy


I'd presume that it wouldn't be life using genetic material like DNA. With the amount of radiation there, mutations would render anything unfit to replicate. I could be sold on something like a prion though but nothing more complicated than that.

Just my opinion.

That is very interesting (at least to me, lol)

It always bothered me how people set limits to what life outside of Earth may or may not look like. They forget just how extraordinary diverse life is right here, on Earth. I mean, just the simplest example, look at how different plant life is from animal life. Or how life finds a way to get into every ecological niche.

The archaea, bacteria-like microorganisms that go back as far as 3.5 billion years, seem to prefer extreme environments. It's quite obvious that life on Earth, at its very beginnings, was surviving and evolving in some pretty harsh conditions. Who know, maybe life came to Earth from somewhere with even more extreme conditions? If life always finds a way here on Earth, maybe some type of life, one that even challenges our own definition of life (which is quite disputed anyways), finds a way everywhere in the universe.

I misread your post and thought it said 'space is filled with GEMS'
I thought "Bagsy the huge planet sized diamond " its supposed to be only a few million miles away mayeb even a couple of light years away