Recently, a Senior Astronomer from the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Institute (SETI), Seth Shostak, stated in a blog post that there is a likelihood that every life form on Earth could have Martian origins, including you!
The concept that life on Earth may have originated from microorganisms of another place is called panspermia.
According to Shostak, the basics of this idea are very old, however, very interesting and worthy to debate on.
“It’s possible that billions of years ago, tiny bits of biology quit the Red Planet and infected ours. If so, your family tree and that of every other terrestrial life form, has its deepest roots not in the ancient oceans of Earth, but in the vanished seas of Mars,” said Shostak.
One possible scenario of this theory is that the microorganisms are strong enough to cross space. Hence, they could have come here, possibly being pushed by cosmic beams.
Shostak doesn’t believe this idea is quite possible since his opinion is that space isn’t a safe habitable zone. Instead, he believes that a safer way for alien bacteria to travel space would be within a rock.
“After all, space is hardly benign. Cosmic rays, extreme temperatures, and prolonged desiccation will relentlessly corrode any biology that takes too much time en route. Being inside a rock helps,” Shostak pointed out.
The theory above is famous as lithopanspermia.
If rocks from Mars hatched life, Shostak believes it would have been a short journey due to the severe circumstances.
Many scientists believe that a large number of rocks commuted between Mars and Earth. According to this theory, this event happened at the beginning days of the solar system.
Shostak says some of them came here within a year. However, the greatest portion of them took a much longer time to arrive.
Although it takes a long time, Shostak believes there is still a possibility that the strongest microorganisms survived the journey.
“Astrobiologists have identified terrestrial bacteria able to zone out in spore form for a million years. If you eventually put them in contact with water, they’ll come back to life like sea monkeys,” says Shostak.
Biochemist Steven Benner of Florida’s Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology wrote a paper in 2013. The paper promoted the theory that life on Earth has Martian origins.
Benner claimed he discovered evidence that Mars had suitable conditions to hold life in the distant past.
“The new argument, in a nutshell, is that young Mars had a more oxygen-rich atmosphere than Earth did 4 billion years ago, and was drier. This would have resulted in a different mineralogical surface environment, one that could have provided a catalyst for the assembly of key RNA molecules and all the biotic chemistry leading to life as we know it. Subsequent asteroid impacts on Mars would have spewed chunks of rock into space, carrying life (presumably in microbial form) through the solar system and onto the surface of a youthful Earth,”Scientific American wrote, considering Benner’s theory.
Scientists at the University of Sheffield and the University of Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, claim to have found plenty of microorganisms that arrived from space. Some of them through meteors and others present in the stratosphere.
Professor Milton Wainwright told the Daily Express: “The evidence points towards theories that complex living organisms are falling from the skies to Earth.”
“There is growing evidence that says this DNA comes from space and it is carried into our atmosphere on micro-meteorites before dissipating,” he added.
Astrobiologist Richard Hoover is famous for working with NASA and establishing the Astrobiology Research Group at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center. He also worked as a professor at the Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham.
Hoover told the attendees at the International UFO Congress he believes we have enough of evidence extraterrestrial life exists.
In an interview by Huffington Post, writer Lee Speigel spoke about the Martian life forms.
“I am absolutely convinced that life is not restricted to the planet Earth because I have found the remains of life forms that are absolutely conclusively extraterrestrial.”
So, maybe each one of us is, directly or indirectly, a Martian. However, this is just a theory which not many mainstream scientists support it.