waiter, there's a bug in my salad

How does life spread from planet to planet? Comets are one potential vector, as are meteorites, space ships, and now, electromagnetic fields.

Dehel calculated the effect of electric fields at various levels in the atmosphere on a bacterium that was carrying an electric charge. He showed that such bacteria could easily be ejected from the Earth's gravitational field by the same kind of electromagnetic fields that generate auroras. And these fields occur every day, unlike the extraordinarily large surface impacts needed to eject interplanetary meteorites....

Charged microbes could also be propelled outwards from a planet at high speed by “magnetospheric plasmoids” - independent structures of plasma and magnetic fields that can be swept away from the Earth’s magnetosphere. Hitching rides on these structures could accelerate microbes to speeds capable of taking them out of the solar system and on to the planets of other stars.

And because of the potential for a steady outflow of the particles pushed by the electric fields, a single life-bearing world might seed an entire galaxy with life, claims Dehel.

The evidence cuts both ways: it makes the panspermia hypothesis more plausible, but also makes it likely that life discovered elsewhere in our own solar system--say, on Mars--could have originated on earth.

See also...
tossed salad in space
tossed in space