The price of found meteorites just went up. Check out this link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110306/sc_nm/us_meteorites_life
Now every cosmic find will be studied within a micro-inch of its life.
Will our search for life on other planets stall while we turn our tunnel vision on meteorites? Obviously the cost of studying pieces of space which have already arrived on the planet is far smaller than gathering particles of dust hundreds of miles above our atmosphere.
We must continue all research. Someday the questions will be answered, until then we must keep looking everywhere.
One question that this story brings to my mind is: don’t fossils need liquid water to form? If this is true, then this fossilized bacterium must have formed on a larger body. I don’t think a fossil could form in the dry vacuum of space. If this an example of extraterrestrial life, it needed to be knocked off some body large enough to hold liquid water by an impact, or there is one other possibility. Is it feasible another solar system existing long before ours, was blown apart by a super nova, spreading the seeds for life all over the cosmos. Remember our solar system is only about 4.5 billion years old; it’s estimated the universe is over 13.5 billion years old.
Life could have evolved several billion years before our solar system was even thought of.
Brings a whole new meaning to the saying: Sparkle in your fathers eye.
