Panspermia, Past and Present: Astrophysical and Biophysical Conditions for the Dissemination of Life in Space

Abstract

Astronomically, there are viable mechanisms for distributing organic material throughout the Milky Way. Biologically, the destructive effects of ultraviolet light and cosmic rays means that the majority of organisms arrive broken and dead on a new world. The likelihood of conventional forms of panspermia must therefore be considered low. However, the information content of dam-aged biological molecules might serve to seed new life (necropanspermia).

Accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews

References in corpus (3)

• Dust detection by the wave instrument on STEREO: nanoparticles picked up by the solar wind?
• Lithopanspermia in Star Forming Clusters
• Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space from Planets in the Extra-Solar Systems to a Planet in our Solar System and Vice-Versa

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• Dynamics of escaping Earth ejecta and their collision probability with different Solar System bodies
• Statistical Signatures of Panspermia in Exoplanet Surveys
• On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informatics Perspective
• The Habitability of the Galactic Bulge
• The best place and time to live in the Milky Way
• Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk
• Dynamical and biological panspermia constraints within multi-planet exosystems
• Feasibility of Detecting Interstellar Panspermia in Astrophysical Environments
• A Birth-Death-Migration Model for Life in Astrophysical Environments
• The New Astronomical Frontier of Interstellar Objects
• DNA sequencing and predictions of the cosmic theory of life
• On possible life-dispersal patterns beyond the Earth
• Solid grains ejected from terrestrial exoplanets as a probe of the abundance of life in the Milky Way
• Paul Wesson and Space-Time-Matter Theory