This should be headline news everywhere. This is the most important thing to happen this week. This month. This century. Maybe ever. Life has been discovered in outer space!
Of course, it is microscopically small life, little sea plankton particles growing on the outside of the International Space Station, like barnacles on a ship. Who was the scientist who said that our first contact with extra-terrestrial life would be some kind of bacteria or something extremely small like that? Was it Sagan? Whoever it was, he just got proved right.
No matter that it’s small. There is life outside of the Earth!
No matter that it’s growing on an artificial surface. It proves that live can survive in deep space, without any atmosphere, and exposed to extremes of solar radiation alternating with the terrifying cold of the void.
It doesn’t even matter that it’s terrestrial in origin. Nobody’s quite sure how it got there, but since it’s not something usually found in the middle of landlocked Southern Russia, scientists think it probably drifted up (being particulate matter, lighter than air) into outer space, which is kind of an amazing development with regards to terrestrial life as well. Our atmosphere is not an impermeable barrier. It’s thin enough for meteors to come in and destroy everything, which means it’s thin enough that some life can get out. That’s important, but it’s doubly amazing that life formed on Earth can live, and thrive, in space. Without a space suit, outside of a ship, that is.
If it’s that easy for life to leave a planet and grow in outer space, then life is almost undoubtedly widespread throughout the universe.
Now, it’s just microscopic plankton. What if the station is up there for a thousand years? Will it be covered with moss? What about a million years? What about the multi-generational Stanford Torus ark ships? Will they arrive, millions of years in the future, at some distant solar system, covered with forests, encased in a self-generated atmosphere, with squirrels leaping from branch to branch and birds flitting around and around? Maybe they will. Maybe they will.
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