Story 1 begins — can life survive being blasted off Mars?

2:21Our first story is on astrobiology, one of those fields that sits right at the edge of what science can currently say and addresses one of the biggest questions in humanity, which is are we alone? And a new study just took one of the toughest organisms on Earth, simulated the violence of an asteroid slamming into Mars, and watched what happened. And the survival rates might genuinely surprise you as they surprised me. This is in PNAS Nexus out of Johns Hopkins University on March 3rd. Yeah, this is very recent. >> Fresh off the presses. Yeah, very

3:02recent. And as you said, right? A core question that we ask as humans is are we alone? Well, a follow-up to that would be, well, could life travel between worlds, right? Let's say that life started on Mars and then an asteroid impact hit it. The debris from that asteroid traveled the entire solar system between Mars and Earth and ended up on Earth, and that's what seeded life on Earth. This is the idea of lithopanspermia. Litho meaning rock, panspermia meaning this sort of like life everywhere type thing, right? And um for the longest time, it's kind of been

3:42just like kooky woo-woo type science, been discredited, and this paper is really challenging a lot of the assumptions that we make about how unlikely this process is. The idea that life can generate in one place and then travel through the vacuum of space to another place and then continue to flourish. >> Yeah, yeah, dude. It's It's It's pretty cool. They've They've done some really cool experiments. This paper uses something called Deinococcus radiodurans, which is a bacterium that colloquially is known as the Conan the bacterium because it's like indestructible. You know, like Conan the >> Barbarian. >> Yeah. It's like indestructible. And what

4:24they've done is do experiments about what this bacterium could survive through, and it turns out it's a lot.