Unlikely sounding indeed. You look around, you see people, you see bacteria. They came from somewhere. One possibility is single cell organisms evolved from

Unlikely sounding indeed. You look around, you see people, you see bacteria. They came from somewhere. One possibility is single cell organisms evolved from nothing on Earth, the other is their ancestors evolved somewhere else and arrived from space, a theory called panspermia. The panspermia theory was fringy at first, but is now covered in every Astronomy 101 textbook. For those unfamiliar, here is the short version of the theory: You have a star with a planet with microbes living in water. When the star goes through the red giant phase, the oceans are boiled off and blown off into space along with some microbes. The microbes move from star to star through space, and seed new planets around new stars. You'd expect to see them as dust in interstellar space if this was happening. The spectra of a lot of observed dust is indeed unexplained, supporting but obviously not proving the panspermia theory. Researchers at Cardiff, where this current work was done, have done a lot of the fundamental work on panspermia, theoretically checking the mechanisms to verify they are consistant with known laws. Now we have this claim from India that microbe spores that reproduce between 100C and 300C have been recovered from rain water, and the Cardiff guys have a sample to experiment with. It is the nature of science not to accept radical new theories quickly, the joke goes that it takes about 30 years, long enough for the scientists to die and the new generation to arrive. If scientists want to accelerate the rate of progress, unexpected results should be investigated carefully and aggressively.