Microcosms all the way down
So a black fungus has evolved inside the Chernobyl reactor last year. A fungus that feeds on gamma radiation. Keep that in mind for a moment.
Someday I believe that we are going to find out that our little oblate spheroid of earth has more in common with deep sea hydrothermal vents than most people realize. Deep sea vents have collections of life growing around them. Bacteria process the chemical energy pouring out of the vent into an edible food supply that allows a diverse collection of animals to thrive. It is the same for Earth: solar energy pouring out of the sun is processed by plant life which converts it into an an edible food supply that allows a diverse collection of animals to thrive.
The deep sea vents are almost entirely isolated from our solar energy cycle. If, somehow, the sun were to stop producing energy (say we encase it in a Dyson sphere within Earth’s orbit) the deep sea vent communities would go on living and thriving as long as Earth’s molten core keeps on chugging out energy. I only say they are almost entirely isolated because the collection of life around them must have collected from the general collection of life on the planet. In other words, they are self-sustaining now, but at some point the essential components for life must have filtered down and evolved into lifeforms that were capable of feeding on the chemical energy. Life probably didn’t originate at these vents, just as I believe that life didn’t originate on Earth.
The more places we look for life, or even just look as in Chernobyl, the more places we find it. Down at the bottom of the ocean so deep that the lack of solar energy means that life surely can’t possibly exist? Thriving, teeming communities of all sorts of life. In the heart of a massively irradiated reactor where life couldn’t possibly survive? A new form of life that is eating the radiation. Inside the boiling pools of Yellowstone National Park where the extreme temperature must preclude the existence of life? Microscopic organisms that could live nowhere else. Wherever we look, if there is some kind of energy source life is already there. Rather than the exception, it seems to me that we are just a deep sea vent, irradiated reactor, or boiling lake in the solar system. We have an abundant source of energy, so we are just teeming with life. If I put a piece of bread and some rocks on a table, should I be surprised when mold soon starts to grow on the available food source?
The problem with the theory is that we have, as yet, no real proof. Yes we have found organic compounds in metorites…maybe. Until we find somewhere else with a similar abundance of energy (Venus?) and find or not find life, there is nothing to compare. Maybe life is everywhere on Earth because we are the one lucky planet in the galaxy.
But let’s get back to that fungus. It literally eats gamma radiation in an environment such high levels that it simply shoudn’t be able to survive. It doesn’t need anything else, no oxygen or even an atmosphere. It is entirely possible that this fungus could survive a trip through space, and that’s all it would take. A planet with some kind of energy, being hit by microscopic life imported from space dust, comets, and meteors, would eventually find itself just as covered as a deep sea vent.
Look at it this way. Assume our planet is truly the only source of life in the galaxy (or universe!). As already described our planet is literally covered in the stuff to such a degree that even in a very short human timeframe, the right kind of life to feed on a new environment (Chernobyl Reactors) is able to form. Our planet is regularly spewing off ejecta from volcanos, minor meteor impacts, and major impacts (the last being about 65 million years ago). Much of that material eventually falls back to us, or trails along behind us like a streamer of matter. But some of that matter escapes our orbit. If we continue this scenario forward millions and millions (and millions) of years then some of the elements of life developed on Earth will reach other planets in our galaxy.
The biggest problem I have with this theory, Panspermia is that it doesn’t answer the question of where life came from or how it originated, but only moves the source and seemingly makes research into the origins of life on Earth a pointless gesture (of course it isn’t). But I still find it very compelling.
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