Where Earth life originated?
First of all happy new year and wish all have a good year ahead.
It was during my holiday that I started to think where possibly Earth life originated. Was it there since the beginning of time? Or aliens introduced it? Or a meteorite hit the Earth at some point and brought some microbes survived all the way?
For that, I did some search on the net, as usual, and found an interesting article from Space.com. As strange as it may sound, there’s some supporting evidence that Earth’s life came from Mars.
Surprising, isn’t it? But how?
Some studies show Mars had some sort of life, microbial, at some point before it loses its atmosphere. How Mars has lost its atmosphere is the topic of another discussion. But what studies suggest is Mars rocks have come to Earth somehow and these brought life to the Earth. Given Earth had a better condition than Mars, life evolved here and after billions of years, here we are.
You may wonder how possibly Mars rocks came to Earth without the involvement of an intelligent species? The answer is simple, asteroid strike. An asteroid strike hits Mars and causes its rocks to spread and some lands on Earth. Sounds like a fantasy? But it’s not. It is real, so far of over 61,000 meteorites that have been found on Earth, 224 were identified as Martian as of January 2019, source. Even in 2012, a piece of Mars rock has landed on the Moroccan desert, source.
If you are keen to know more about Mars meteorite, read this Wikipedia article.
Why do I care?
You may wonder again why I do care where life on Earth came from? That backs to this wild idea that if scientists figure out how life has introduced to Earth, given good survival conditions for microbial life, the same thing can be emulated on other planets. Again, far from realistic, but let’s say on some exoplanets.
Or at least the possibility of the occurrence can be measured. As you may know, scientists almost every other day are finding exoplanets and it would be more interesting to know the possibilities of life there. Or even evaluate if the human can make something about it, means making planets habitable.