The question of where life began is one of the enduring mysteries of science. Charles Darwin himself speculated that it might have happened in “a warm little pond,” while modern biologists think the superheated water around seafloor volcanic vents is a more likely spot.
But a far more exotic proposal has been floating around for years: maybe life first arose in outer space and came to earth fully formed. It’s an astonishing idea, but it’s not completely crazy: after all, astronomers have discovered dozens of organic molecules floating in giant interstellar clouds, and meteorites have been cracked apart to reveal amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
It’s no surprise, then, that a paper just published in the online Journal of Cosmology has suddenly grabbed the world’s attention. Titled “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites” and authored by NASA scientist Richard Hoover of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, it makes the audacious claim that a meteorite that slammed into France in the 1800s has clear evidence pointing to space-dwelling microbes. “The implications,” says an online synopsis of the paper, “are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets.”
Well, maybe. But before anyone gets too excited, a little history lesson is in order. Back in 1996, TIME’s cover trumpeted the astonishing words “Life on Mars.” A NASA scientist claimed he’d found evidence that ancient bacteria had once lived inside a Martian rock that had been picked up in Antarctica
