Friday, November 17, 2023

'Bouncing' comets could be seeding life across the universe

...Earth was a cauldron of chaos 4.5 billion years ago. Somehow, it seeded life. And when it did, Earth emerged as a singular place amongst the planetary throng, at least as far as the Solar System is concerned.

The answer to how life began on Earth isn’t purely introspective. The rules for making life could apply elsewhere, too. The number of known planets beyond the Sun, called exoplanets, has now surpassed 5,500. Some of their conditions are a far stretch from what we see in our cosmic neighborhood, while others seem more familiar. The question of life then comes up. If the Milky Way is filled with billions of stars, couldn’t life have sprouted on one of their worlds?

Life on Earth appeared 3.8 billion years ago, and it had to come about in one of two ways: Either endogenously, meaning 100 percent homegrown, or it’s exogenously, in which case it got an extraterrestrial boost from asteroids or comets. READ MORE FROM INVERSE

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