PhysOrg.com: Simulation shows how Earth may have seeded life on other planets
From wildunicornherd via James Nicoll,
When comets and asteroids impact Earth, we’re usually most concerned with how the impact events have affected life here. But scientists have pointed out that these impact events can eject pieces of Earth’s crust containing biological organisms into space, and if ejected at the right velocities from the right location on Earth, the ejected material could collide with another planet and seed life elsewhere in the Solar System. By using new simulations to analyze the dynamics of these ejected particles, and by tripling the number of particles compared with previous studies to improve the statistics, researchers have found that particles could not only reach Venus, the Moon, and Mars, but for the first time they show that particles from Earth could also reach Jupiter.
Oh sh—
