Together with several other microscopic organisms, these representatives of earthly life will be carried in a package that will be flown on a Russian robot spacecraft and are scheduled to be returned to Earth in 2012. The experiment - Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or Life - is designed to show if living organisms can survive unprotected in space for long periods and thus support the theory of panspermia, which argues that simple organisms can survive for years as they float through space and that life on Earth could have been wafted here from another world.
"Some scientists believe the solar system's first living organisms may have originally evolved on Mars and were then blasted to Earth on debris that was thrown into space when meteorites crashed on to Mars," said Dr Bruce Betts, of the US Planetary Society, which has funded the $1m Life project. "On Earth these simple microbe-like beings then started to evolve - ultimately into animals and humans. In other words, we may all be Martians under our skin."
This is pretty cool!
No comments:
Post a Comment