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Do microorganisms spend their entire lives in Earth's atmosphere, or are they simply found there? It doesn't seem surprising that some would find their way up there, but I have a hard time imagining how microorganisms could maintain a certain altitude. On land, they can anchor themselves to hospitable environments to breed, but in the atmosphere, how could they find one another?

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Apparently they do live in the upper atmosphere. [1].

> Although many of the organisms borne aloft are likely occasional visitors to the upper troposphere, 17 types of bacteria turned up in every sample. Researchers like environmental microbiologist and co-author Kostas Konstantinidis suspect that these microbes may have evolved to survive for weeks in the sky, perhaps as a way to travel from place to place and spread their genes across the globe. "Not everybody makes it up there," he says. "It's only a few that have something unique about their cells" that allows them survive the trip.

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/01/microbes-survive-and...

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