My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Isn't the most simple explanation that mushroom spores which can, readily and do travel interstellarly are the way life is sperad throughout the universe? Being neither plant nor animal but posessing aspects of both, and closely related to slime mold a "traveling plant," these spores seem a likely candidate for being the messaegers of the "gods" as they have been previously called, as well as being called "Plants of the Gods" (Amanita Muscaria- see Shultes and Hoffmann "Plants of the Gods).

Well, these little chaps would be much more primitive than spores but in about the same mass range. They are born in a reducing atmosphere and have incredible resistance to radiation damage. We have little idea of how long they can live but if they mine zpe and can go into a dormant crystaline state, who knows.

Another problem is that they ride outward on the solar wind. So lets say, we have a brand new sun and solar system, and new life. This new sun has a high solar wind pressure. Our little colonists are pushed out at quite a lick but can't approach other hot new suns, because of their high solar wind pressure. I suppose they could land in the far debris and wait for gravity to bring them in at some point.

(Edited) Um... I suppose this is a question for Tom Van Flandern. Early life can create a crystaline state for itself . It's driven out by the solar wind, now can its crystaline state give it magnetic qualities that ups it velocity? Yeah, if one threw into space, some tiny left hand magnetic propertied gloves, some right handed ones and some with two thumbs, which would be flicked out the fastest?

Stoat- When it comes to "little chaps" and "would be," i become the scientist with spores and you the "artist." i see no separation. We must not see "art" and "science" as separate, as relativity and quantum theory have shown there is no underlying separation to the unified field. If science does not move on to incorporate art we will be stuck in the old Newtonian order that relativity and quantum theory bi-passed in the past century. As Parmenides and the ancient oriental philosophers knew over 2,400 years ago, and we have only recently "discovered", everything is ONE. Beyond the mechanical level fragmentation becomes divisive and insideous.

These little chaps [] are about 0.2 to 0.6 microns wide and are know as the Archaeans. If there were a street fight between them and the fungal spores, I'd put money on the Archaens[8D][]

I just has a look at what I had laying about on panspermia. Way out of date but a couple of points worth noting. M type dwalf suns were completely ignored as possible acceptor suns. It now looks as though such suns can have planets. The other point was about how these little lads [] can be ejected by electrostatic forces. I think i'd put money on sprites from the tops of storm clouds. When our planet had a reducing green house gas atmosphere, the storms must have been frequent and energetic.

We're going off topic a wee bit []

I went looking for some pictures of these little chaps, reasoning that if they need to be electrostatically charged then it might help to think about the charge density on them. I found two pictures, one rod shaped the other egg shaped.

Of the three domains of life, bacteria, archaeans and us (eukaryotes) it seems we are most closely related to the archaeans. Great[8D] I'm a terrible snob, and look the other way when passing by bacteria of any sort. Also, because I love anything Greek, I can see these lads as Achilles' troops. So macho that they are just plain stupid.

Now let's say that we have right handed and left handed charged up archaeans in space. They polarise light, being diamagnetic but so does other stuff in space. It might be that that one or the other, of our archaens, has to waste a bit of time turning, before it can get off the blocks and away. It would only take a couple of weeks for these boys to reach Mars but for longer journeys "handedness" may give a faster ejection from the solar system.

This may give some partial explanation of why life seems to choose a particular handedness but then again, one hand could have out competed the other at an early stage of life. No idea why that should happen.[]

An odd bit of synchronicity there. The BBC science programme Horizon was on tonight, subject, panspermia. I think people in the states wil be able to see it, as it's a big budget slickly put together science show.

They were very upbeat about the idea, in fact I was a bit annoyed that they didn't present the case against to any great degree.

(Edited) I took a look at "sprites" to see what polarity they are, and it seems that negative sprites also exist but are rarer. I think that if, because of their shape, our spacebound archaeans leak charge, then they will have a slight magnetic field. Magnetic field lines from the sun will push/pull them in curved trajectories, while the solar wind will push out normal to the sun. All lots of hard sums to do, so I think I'll just forget about it[] Not that I'm lazy [] but that I'm coming down with a dose of the dreaded Fred Hoyles. If god pretended to be out when Einstein popped round to offer advice, he left the country when Fred Hoyle came round.