Comment #184349 by chuckgoecke on May 24, 2008 at 6:14 pm
I think this supports the idea of panasperma, extraterrestrial life may have seeded Earth. Organisms like this would both be able to survive the shattering blow of a planetoid, maybe Mars sized, like they think hit the Earth and gave rise to the Moon, as well as ejection into deep space, to travel for millions(or billions) of years to other star systems, crash down on another planet, and start up living again. Interesting possibilities. Life is incredibly tenacious.

I think that panspermia is still a very doubtful hypothesis. The catch in it, is that it is extremely likely that any bacteria would be able to survive the prolonged cosmic radiation it would be exposed to. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
Although the article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
is also very interesting.