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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

Wow. This significantly increases the probability of microbial life on Asteroids, and even Panspermia.

3yrs (projected 8) vs potentially thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc for interplanetary, or beyond, is still a ways to go.

Article mentions it would likely be buried in the rock though, so potentially different environmental conditions?

The fact we've found >100 rocks from Mars on Earth from meteorites is pretty cool though.

That's true, but that's a 'half life' like situation. Start with a large enough initial colony and there will be enough time to mutate for some individuals to develop a new bag of tricks. At some initial fragment size (say, a good chunk of a planet) you might end up with something that can make it to the next star system and still be viable in some way.

A big chunk of a planet hitting another planet would melt and sterilize both of them during the collision.

A BIG CHUNK turns into a range of manageable pieces over a star system. The bigger the chunk, the higher the probability of a piece existing that is both large enough needed to harbour microbial life and not so big as to melt and sterilise other planets.

We're talking about spores, no? Spores do not evolve.

Spores have to get to the point where they can be spores. So the organisms that give rise to the spores do evolve. And technically spores are still alive (they are single cells, just better protected than normal cells and they don't perform any reproductive activity while in their spore state).

Comets are mostly clumps of rocks and dust held together by ice. In the middle of those clumps the germs would be pretty safe.

And do they die or just become dormant, waiting for some heat..

A few years ago, someone asked a scientist if there could be life on the moon today. He answered of course there is life on the moon: We accidentally brought it with us when the moon landers left equipment behind.

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