Here’s a thorny problem: What if life doesn’t always appear on planets that can support it? What if we find more and more exoplanets and determine that some of them are habitable? What if we also determine that life hasn’t appeared on them yet?
Could we send life-bringing comets to those planets and seed them with terrestrial life? And if we could do that, should we?
This is the question that a new research article in the journal Astrobiology explores. The paper is “Directed Panspermia Using Interstellar Comets.” The authors are Christopher P. McKay, Paul C.W. Davies, and Simon P. Worden. They’re from NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, and Breakthrough Initiatives, respectively.
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