Impacts Spreading Life through the Cosmos?

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Impacts Spreading Life through the Cosmos?
by Paul Gilster on May 25, 2012

Still catching up after the recent series on antimatter propulsion, I want to move into some intriguing work on panspermia, the idea that life may spread throughout a Solar System, and perhaps from star to star, because of massive impacts on a planetary surface. Catching up with older stories means leaving some things unsaid about antimatter — in particular, I want to return to the question of antimatter storage, which in my mind is far more significant a problem even than antimatter production. But there’s time for that next week, and as I said yesterday, interesting stories keep accumulating and deserve our attention.
Planetary Ejecta and Trapped Microorganisms
What Tetsuya Hara (Kyoto Sangyo University) and colleagues put forth in a recent paper are their calculations about the ejection of life-bearing rocks and water into space from events like the possible ‘dinosaur killer’ asteroid impact some 65 million years ago, which involved an asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter. It’s a remarkable fact that materials can be knocked off one planetary surface and wind up on another, and in some quantity. Consider, for example, the 100 or ...