From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 14:36:08 MST
On Fri, 20 Dec 2002, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> I seem to recall that D. radiodurans is robust against desiccation and
> that the radiation resistence is indeed just a byproduct of that.
Either way round, it's easy to calculate the exposure during transit on
micron sized dust stream over some 10 light years, given some 100 km/s
speed. I'd rather know how dirt-dwellers managed to get into these
interstellar dust streams with a high efficiency. Either way round, I
think they're toast.
Maybe comets are contaminated, and bloom briefly during perihelion
carrying the contamination outwards, facilitating crossover at the
outskirts if stellar gravity wells. A large enough body would offer enough
shielding for embedded organism spores.
But I sure haven't heard of any papers citing this. The ejected pebbles
don't do interstellar hops apparently; but they do clearly travel widely
in interplanetary transfer and capture. They never go over 40 C while
having transfer times of Mars-Earth of half a year to several megayears. A
recent paper in Science suggests the observed Mars impacts are
commensurable with Mars rocks actually found (mostly the Antarctica
cache).
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