Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial life. As technology advanced, we have taken many steps in trying to understand it. Advance in technology keeps providing new opportunities to do so. We have held many observations of Venus and Mars and soon NASA will be sending missions to explore the Moons of Saturn and Uranus to know if life exists, or ever existed, on these celestial bodies. We have also spent a substantial amount of time observing outside the solar system and even other galaxies just to find planets similar to the Earth which might be able to sustain life. Amazingly, a recent study claims that evidence of alien life might well exist on Earth itself - in the form of alien fossils!
A study was published in the International Journal of Astronomy titled ‘Solid grains ejected from terrestrial exoplanets as a probe of the abundance of life in the Milky Way' which claims something similar. Its lead author, Tomonori Totani, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo, suggests that there could be a good chance of finding microbial alien life on Earth which might have entered our atmosphere as interstellar dust and now sits within our planet's soil.
The theory, even if farfetched, is not entirely baseless. The reasoning behind it is backed by science. Totani reveals that every time a big asteroid strikes a planet, rocks and dust are ejected from the ground. While most of it eventually settles back, a part of it is also released into space. About 10 percent of the entire ejected volume will eventually leave the solar system itself and travel into interstellar space.
While chances are pretty slim, there is a possibility that such tiny fragments of rocks from a planet where life exists traverses
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