I can't find it now, but I recall an article which simulated interstellar transit times for asteroids. The conclusion was that something like the dinosaur killer asteroid could throw rocks into orbit. After 100M years, some of those rocks could have reached other solar systems (i.e alpha centauri)
Given that life on Earth is ~4 billion years old, there's good reason to be believe we've seeded rocks across a sphere ~100 or more light years across.
Whether those rocks reach another solar system is another question. Space is big, and even giant killer rocks are tiny.
Here's a paper discussing rocks from Earth being tossed all over the solar system after being ejected by impacts on Earth. It's from 2013, and references a lot of earlier papers on the topic.
"Life originated on Earth" is probably the last remaining geocentrism. Literally every other geocentrism has fallen. My prediction is that this one will fall this century, probably with the discovery of simple microbial life elsewhere in the solar system followed by the genetic confirmation of common ancestry.
My favorite definition of life (courtesy of Dr. Christoph Adami and others in evolutionary informatics) is that life is a "phase of matter in which Turing-complete information processing dominates ordinary matter/energy dynamics." A phase of matter means exactly what it sounds like-- solid, liquid gas, life-- though life would be more of a rare exotic phase like a superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate or neutron star stuff (whatever that's called). I seem to recall him or one of his colleagues playing with terms like "computonium" or "Turium" (Turing-complete matter) for life.
Most phases of matter are found all over the place in the universe, but some places in the universe are more hospitable for some than others. Stars are great for plasma. Gas giants are full of gas. Cold icy outer planets are the ideal abodes of solids. Life, like other phases, is probably ubiquitous but Earth just happens to be a place that is peculiarly hospitable to it and a lot of it is found there. That's likely because it's at the edge of many phase boundaries (the water cycle, etc.) and it's been shown that Turing-completeness occurs in systems close to phase boundaries:
Pre-planetary solar asteroid ring had probably not the worst conditions for life to be created. Water is abundant in solar system now, probably not was then too.
Reminds me of a book I recently finished (Death's End by Cixin Liu). A major plot element is sending a human brain to intercept an alien civilization that is en-route to Earth with the hope that the aliens will resurrect the person and use his knowledge establish a better dialog with humanity.
I recall reading another novel where one of the protagonists was resurrected far, far in the future by a seemingly incomprehensible race. (Little spiders, of sorts.) Unfortunately, due to unfamiliarity with humanity, they did a bad job, and his body only lasted a few minutes before dying again.
When Potter was dying he wrote Karaoke (which was about a dying writer writing a play entitled Karaoke who discovers his characters actually exist)
This is followed by Cold Lazarus which is set in a dystopian future in a lab working on the cryogenically frozen head of the author from Karaoke.
There is a fairly open question as to how much of Karaoke is a prequel and how much of it is a concurrent experience of the mind being experimented upon.
At the very least, "poorly reassembled by incomprehensible aliens" is a plot element in the Star Trek TOS pilot. Granted, that character lasted more than a few minutes. And costumes for incomprehensible aliens are expensive, so big veiny heads will do.
Rautavarra's Case by PKD is similar. After an accident, an alien race resuscitates one of the [EDIT: human] victims, leading to some interesting consequences related to differing conceptions of the afterlife.
I'm not a classicist but I'm guessing you meant Homer? Though Plato used the reference to said horse I think he did it on the basis that his audience knew the story already.
Well if you were worried about a spoiler, perhaps you should have stopped reading when he mentioned the book name and that he had finished it. Or maybe immediately after that when he said "major plot point"
After many sessions, my past-life-regression therapist and I agreed that I was once a very powerful and influential tardigrade on a glorious faraway planet and that given the prognosis of humanity, I may be once again, but there's more competition this time.
Reading through some of your other comments, I'm convinced you were P.G. Wodehouse last time around. Seriously though, do you write anywhere else online? Great stuff.
Hrm, ahem. Maybe the fellow who burned acrid poetry?
(Plum would never worry about a "multi-trillion-dollar black-budget", unless it were used to fund a comm network to exchange pics of Pekingese and tips on the care and feeding thereof ;-)
If you've any connections with academic (cognitive) psychological research opportunities, e.g [1], I might know someone with uncanny 'relations' to the aforementioned (and others).
You thrill me, sir! Sadly, my connections (such as they are) are far more banal. Even the mere thought of moving among such scintillating company sends me into gentle ecstasies!
What's this?! "One more coruscation, my dear Watson--yet another brain-wave!" I am transported back to a fleeting email exchange with Charles Tart in 2010. The very man you're after:
Of Dr LeShan's works, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist I highly recommend, specifically the unabridged version. He worked a bit with Eileen J Garrett[1], the tales of which are quite intriguing. This guy was (and still is @96) 100% sincere. No quackery, no nonsense. I had the privilege of acquaintance with his close friend, Dr Hauser, who I'll always fondly remember. LeShan and Hauser met in the Army as young men and remained friends for life. They were both psychologists, but their focuses diverged.
Man, I wish you lived in my neighborhood with that sense of humor. Seeing Johnny Cash say "I may simply be a single drop of rain", but "I'll remain" and "be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again...." had me heaving in a mixture of jovial convulsions and sincere frustration with this dadgum relativity conundrum that ultimately tears us all apart. Brings me to wonder; how many planets might Johnny Cash have thrilled with his reasonably excellent tunes? I just hope that Earth wasn't the only planet in the void to incur the equivalent wrath of Cash + Danzig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWUY57ar18
PS: I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a permanent national Mount Nelson, in approximate accordance with the video in which the concept thereof was reasonably placed slightly above the local peak. I mean, humanity always transcends its circumstances. Why not Willie?
I read a 'Last Man on Earth' short story in an SF anthology with, essentially, this premise. At the end of the story, the exhausted person dies while sitting on the edge of the sea... only to seed the next round of life from all of the lifeforms and organic materials contained therein. Creepy, heady stuff for a preteen. This was the 70's, so the idea has been around awhile.
VerDeTerre came through, above. I read it in an anthology in the children's section of the public library (another good reason for public libraries), but the anthology title is long lost to /dev/null.
Killer, killer anthology. The anthology I read was shorter, but that's ignorable... everybody should go find a copy of 'Adventures in Time and Space', it's a classic full of classics.
This is an interesting concept and has been explored in fiction before, most recently (to my knowledge) in Prometheus. Not the best film, stunning cinematography but lacking good writing, but had a similar premise.
Stephen Baxter's Titan (a fairly bleak novel but not totally outlandish given current world events) ends with astronauts that long ago perished on Titan being resurrected by the sentient race that eventually evolves there. In preparation for the death of our star, they are preparing a rocket to send genetic matter from our solar system to other parts of the galaxy, in some way continuing our lineage.
Plants are faster to duplicate. Assuming the astronaut falls on a world with air and water, if s/he ate some vegetable food containing seeds before dying, they could grow on soil fed by his decaying body.
The question then would be: what happens when all nutrients from the body are depleted?
Well, except for the space part. I honestly think it could happen. There's also a lot of gut bacteria and other micro-organisms that are alive on their own.
I'm wondering more if this spacesuit hit something like a comet, asteroid, or other small body before hitting a planet. If a part of the living ecosystem makes it to a secure nook or gets folded inside of the asteroid, it might survive landing on a planet.
To further quote South Park: "Everything was already done even before the Simpsons. In fact that was just a rip off of an old Twilight Zone episode". (I'm not sure if it really was, but sounds plausable!)
We don't know if life exists or has existed on other bodies of our solar system, therefore we take great precautions to avoid contamination. Probes are sterilized, and some regions of Mars (Mars Special Regions) are barred from landings, until we can ensure better sterilization of what we send there. It would be a shame to contaminate life samples from other planets with our own before we can study it.
Private parties still have to comply with planetary protection treaties. In fact any colonization plan, or even commercial flight, to Mars (or anywhere else in the solar system) from SpaceX needs to be approved by the US. It's not a free for all out there, space is governed by treaties.
That's a big hurdle to colonization and commercial exploitation. Because it means you have to show you're not contaminating alien life.
I would be really excited if we find traces of life on Mars but, at the same time, it would probably delay commercial exploitation and colonization for decades...
It depends what the US allows them to do, the same way you cannot legally "cut corners" with FDA regulations.
Obviously you cannot sterilize astronauts. But they could be restrained to landings outside of the special regions, which are the most promising for astrobiology.
Given that life on Earth is ~4 billion years old, there's good reason to be believe we've seeded rocks across a sphere ~100 or more light years across.
Whether those rocks reach another solar system is another question. Space is big, and even giant killer rocks are tiny.