Can living microbes travel between the planets, blown off one by a colossal asteroid impact, for example, and carried in debris to another? Some have suggested that life on Earth originated on Mars in just this way, but interesting work by electrical engineer Tom Dehel now offers an alternative. Dehel, who is also working on a law degree at Rutgers, was studying the Earth’s electromagnetic fields and their impact on GPS satellite systems for the FAA when he realized that bacteria could be ejected from Earth by the kind of fields that create auroras.
The work, presented at a meeting of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in Beijing, was the subject of a recent New Scientist story by David Chandler. And it’s intriguing because whereas asteroid impacts of the needed size were relatively rare even in the early Solar System, the electromagnetic fields in question are common.
Dehel sees the possibility of bacteria floating in the upper atmosphere and reproducing there, evolving ways to cope with near vacuum conditions and strong UV. He also discusses what he calls ‘magnetospheric plasmoids’ made up of plasma and magnetic fields that could accelerate microbes to great velocities as they break free of Earth’s magnetosphere.
From the abstract to Dehel’s presentation “Uplift and Outflow of Bacterial Spores via Electric Field”:
Here we show the possibility that the forces of uplift on a charged bacteria particle are sufficient bring at least some lighter types of bacteria high into the ionosphere, and subsequently move the charged spore onto magnetic field lines. The bacteria spore is then driven down the magnetotail, where, during a solar storm, a structure known as a plasmoid is propelled radially outward into space at velocities exceeding solar system escape velocity. From that point, the plasmoids are capable of reaching Mars, the outer planets, and even others systems, eventually depositing the bacterial spores either via comets or direct interaction with the receiving planet.
Thus we construct another possible mechanism for moving life between worlds. If these notions prove robust, the expectation of finding life elsewhere in the Solar System receives a boost, but notice that Dehel is talking about bacterial transfers occurring not just between planets in the same system but between stars. Thanks to Luke Schubert for the link to this story, which reminds this writer that theories long discarded sometimes surface with renewed vigor. Panspermia in various forms is a case in point, one that raises the question of just how unfamiliar extraterrestrial life may be.
Excellent post, I’m forwarding this one to my co-contributor Charlie as he’ll be well interested.
Hi Paul
I mentioned Greg Benford’s “The Sun Born” which is a tale about plasma creatures out near the Sun’s magnetopause. One of them specialises in manipulating cold matter and creates an artificial biosphere on Pluto. Another explored too close to the Sun – their unapproachable origin – and becomes trapped inside the lithosphere of Mars as a kind of planetary electric circuit, living symbiotically with the subarean bacteria.
The new electromagnetic spaceflight for bacteria kind of makes me wonder – just how accessible is Earth’s surface to potential plasma lifeforms?
And other stars? A detached plasmoid might last long enough to carry charged spores to interstellar speeds ~ say 300 km/s. If they can stay charged – or be recharged by cosmic rays – they will be deccelerated to safe arrival speeds in a new star system as a result.
Wickramasinghe & Hoyle’s “Cosmic Lifeforce” proposed the odd spectral features of interstellar dust were due to bacterial spores. More recent work has implicated silicate dust as the real cause. However if W & H’s spectral analysis is correct I’d say perhaps we can’t tell. And vacuum deposited silicates might provide a handy protective coating for any bacteria in molecular clouds. An interesting possibility they raised was that the magnetite present in some bacteria might be an adaptation to the space environment. Perhaps it’s a handle for planetary EM fields to fling bugs into their true home, the clouds between the stars?
Wright and Rose demonstrated that messages in a bottle are as energy efficient as beaming randomly at the heavens. Certain biological molecular machines are highly conserved within all lifeforms on this planet – every living thing uses them. So I wonder: if you want to spread your message across the aeons and make sure it survives then how would you encode it?
Adam
And don’t forget Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, about an ETI that
is a huge cloud of interstellar hydrogen.
Some people (and that group seems to be growing again – just
look at some of the recent popular literature on the subject) keep
claiming that because ETI haven’t signalled us or that we haven’t
found one of their crashed spaceships or a monolith in our Sol
system, that they probably don’t exist.
My two main responses to that are:
We haven’t been looking long or hard enough in a Universe
13.7 billion light years across and as old to even begin making
such a determination at this point.
We only know what life is like on one planet out of billions in
the Milky Way galaxy alone – and who says planets are the
only or even best places for life to originate and evolve from?
Life Forms Ejected on Asteroid Impact Could Survive to
Reseed Earth According to a Study Published in Astrobiology
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=24844
“In the event that an asteroid or comet would impact Earth
and send rock fragments containing embedded microorganisms
into space, at least some of those organisms might survive
and reseed on Earth or another planetary surface able to
support life, according to a study published in the Spring 2008
(Volume 8, Number 1) issue of Astrobiology.”