LMR-083 · Life
Panspermia
Maybe life didn't start here. Maybe it hitched a ride.
§ A first look
§ Depths
Six ways into the same idea — from bedtime story to chalkboard. No order required.
L1 · Crayon
Told like a bedtime story.
For a curious 10-year-old. No jargon. Just a picture in your head.
Where did life on Earth begin? Most people guess it started here, in a warm shallow pool a long time ago. But there's another idea: maybe it didn't start here at all. Maybe tiny living things first appeared on another planet, got blasted into space inside a chunk of rock by an asteroid impact, drifted across space for a very long time, and eventually fell on Earth as a meteorite — and that's how life arrived here. This 'life came from somewhere else' idea is called panspermia. The universe might have a postal service. The packaging is, to be fair, hostile.
§ Strange but true
- 01Life on Earth might have arrived as a hitchhiker — embedded in a meteorite from somewhere else.
- 02Bacteria have survived years in space on the outside of the ISS. The trip is plausible.
- 03It doesn't answer where life began. It just moves the question to another planet.
§ From the field journal
Panspermia
"Maybe life didn't start here. Maybe it hitched a ride."
— observed, sketched, not yet fully understood.
§ Nearby
Constellations near Panspermia
→
Extremophiles
Earth life that survives boiling acid, radiation, and vacuum. The bar is low.
→
Comets
Dirty snowballs from the edge of the solar system, on million-year orbits.
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Biosignatures
Chemical fingerprints of life. JWST is sniffing for them right now.
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Exoplanet
There are more planets in the galaxy than stars in it.