What If Ancient Life Escaped Earth
In 7.5 billion years, the sun will expand and destroy our planet, destroying all life forms as we know them, of course, a mass extinction on earth could happen much sooner than that.
It might even be our fault. Sooner or later, humans might have to leave their home planet, to find a new home but while that might sound scary, not to mention impossible.
Some scientist says that it’s already been done. Millions of years ago, by organisms much smaller than us, and not nearly as smart.
This is Ajax and here’s what would happen If ancient life escaped from the earth.
Impact Of Meteorite
Imagine that thousands of years ago, a comet sailed through the outer atmosphere of the earth. The comet flew high enough to avoid burning up in the atmosphere, but just low enough to pick up some extremely determined microbes.
The stowaway microbes embedded themselves deep within the pores of the speeding comet, sheltering themselves from the radiation of deep space.
Aeon later, the comet crashed into a planet in another solar system and the surviving microbes began to grow in their new home.
According to two astrophysicists at Harvard University, this might have been done. But if earthly microbes did succeed in trading our planet for a new home.
Does that mean we could one day do the same? Microbes are small in size, but huge in numbers. The most recent estimates say that roughly one trillion different microorganisms species are living on earth.
And while we have yet to discover, 99.999% of them, the microbes we do know are vital to our planet.
At least 50% of the oxygen on earth is produced by photosynthetic microorganisms like algae and cyanobacteria.
And before the evolution of planets, microbes were the only oxygen producers on earth. So, with that in mind, and assuming humans would continue to rely on oxygen to survive. We might need microbes in space to support our lives on other planets.
If the earthly microbes hitchhiking on a comet millions of years ago, the theory is correct, then there could be another planet out there, with a habitat similar to ours on earth.
Unfortunately, this ”alternate earth” would be in another solar system. And humans have only travel as far as the moon.
Sending Microbes To Other Planets
The best way to test this theory would be to send microbes to mars, or other nearby “new earth” candidates, with the hope that they’d be able to foster an atmosphere we could live in.
if the microbes we sent from the earth succeeded in creating an atmosphere like ours and laying the foundation of the food chain.
We would have a much better chance of building a new future ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict how microbes will respond to being in space.
In some cases, bacteria are less harmful, but in other cases, they can grow faster and become dangerous. We don’t know how our microbes could affect existing ecosystems on other planets. They could become an invasive species that would drive the native life on other planets to the brink of extinction.
And it’s hard to say how microbes we sent would evolve on a new planet. Sure, we might get some new plants on a new planet, but what kind of plants?
There’s also the fear that if microbes can successfully planet-hop through space, then the earth is equally at risk of being hurt by them.
If alien microbes infected earth, it could lead to the development of a new disease that we couldn’t cure.
And without cure to some unknown, a treatable alien epidemic that light suddenly appears on our planet, we might be forced to leave our homeworld after all!
What Do We Know
But before you start aggressively searching for a place to buy NASA-approved spacesuits, you should know that we’re far from having a fully-developed theory on space traveling microbes.
After all, we are still learning things about the biology of our atmosphere. Which makes understanding, how it might have been hundreds of millions of years ago even more challenging.
We also don’t know just how long even the most dedicated microbes could survive. We know the tardigrades, for example, can live for decades.
They’re able to survive the harsh environment of space. But can tardigrade or anything else live long enough to make it to an entire solar system?
That remains to be seen. Or maybe not. We don’t know exactly when humans might have to leave the earth.
What if we could travel faster than the speed of light, to find a new home for the entire humanity. Well, that’s a story for another space article. Till then goodbye and take care.
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