It’s all around us. Here’s how to make contact.
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| Low-tech Intergalactic space-ships from small rocks to comets to whole intact solar systems are being flung out into intergalactic space all the time. There are a trillion estimated “rogue stars” (free-flying stars that have escaped their home galaxy) in the Virgo Cluster alone! What passengers might these space-faring missiles be carrying with them? Image, courtesy of NASA, is a Hubble Space Telescope view of ‘The Mice’ galaxies, 300 million light years away—merging galaxies NGC 4676. |
The staff at Comfortable Universe Headquarters is prepared to make a bold, uncompromising claim and we have a common-sense argument to back it up:
Life is EVERYWHERE!
Exhibit A: Earth 4.2 billion years ago (bya). Recent genetic analysis indicates that the LUCA life form—the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” of all surviving life—lived at that time. That is just a few hundred million years after Earth came into existence.
Could something flick life’s light switch on that fast if it was a rare and uncommon event?
Importantly, LUCA was a surprisingly complex organism. It already had to have a long history of evolution, which suggests that it lived in a diverse microbial community including predatory viruses. LUCA had a cell membrane enclosing its cytoplasm, which included DNA, RNA, and Ribosomes (the tools required to build proteins). Its DNA encoded around 2600 different proteins and included a simple immune system called CRISPR that protects it from invading viruses.
Clearly, LUCA was far from the original simple entity that first crossed the threshold from inorganic blob to living thing.
And it is the crossing of that mysterious threshold that we most want to focus on here in Song 28. Based on the LUCA genetic analysis and on geologic studies of Earth’s early history and on fossil evidence, it had to happen super-fast (by Cosmic and geologic standards). Earth consolidated from the protoplanetary disk about 4.54bya; and there is already evidence for liquid water on Earth by 4.4bya. 200 million years later, you had LUCA.
From habitability (liquid water on a chemically diverse, well-mixed rocky crust) to the first spark of life in somewhere between zero and 200 million years? This is the key basis of our Song of Everything’s common-sense argument that life is everywhere.
After that … after life gets started … perhaps a lot of the habitable planets in the universe run into problems. But once that spark is ignited, we don’t care! Read on for the continuation of the argument.
LUCA’s home—Earth 4.2bya—would seem like a living hell to us. It was under constant heavy bombardment by a rain of large and small meteors, asteroids, and rock fragments that were still roaming the proto-planetary disc. LUCA probably lived in deep, extremely active hydrothermal vents, which were the byproducts of these continuous impacts.
According to latest research, summarized in the 21 January 2026 PBS NOVA episode entitled “Asteroids: Spark of Life,” life may have had its start and actually its ‘heyday’ during that heavy early meteor bombardment in the Hadean Epoch of Earth, when a deep layer of the crust was constantly being seeded with the chemical raw materials for life and churned and stirred by the impacts, creating millions or billions of highly active hydrothermal vents worldwide.
Here’s a Chemistry thought experiment: How many chemical components did the first spark of life require to be gathered and arranged ‘just so’? 100? 1000? How many years of actively mixing these components in a hot soup of nearly boiling water in one single hydrothermal vent are needed to get all these components properly arranged? Can you imagine such a chemical experiment running in a lab for 1000 years? A million years? The famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment got significant results, and it was run for ONLY ONE WEEK!
Come on! The entire Earth was seething with hydrothermal vents, constantly being blasted by more impacts. We didn’t have just one lone isolated experiment—we had millions or billions of them! And they weren’t running for just seven days but continuously for hundreds and thousands of years! All to just get a handful of chemical components to combine in a fairly straightforward configuration. This is NOT brain surgery! Come on, people! Common sense.
Isn’t it just the most natural, most likely conclusion that the first crude life forms were already living and thriving well before 100 frikkin’ million years? It only took 50 million years to raise the Himalayas from sea level. As these early organisms crossed various simple thresholds of self-preservation and self-replication, they would have taken more and more charge of their own development.
Would you bet against it happening somewhere amid millions to billions of different experiments being run in a planet-wide laboratory with 197 million square miles of floor space, with the various experiments being run non-stop for even just ONE MILLION YEARS? Hell, no! I sure wouldn’t.
How about 100,000 years? (With the first Lab techs not even able to write—their notebooks being crude images drawn on cave walls?) Still probably a safe bet.
Life in its simplest single-cell form is just not that special. You could think of it as just a little more complicated version of fire.
But … “Intelligent” life? Human beings? That’s a whole different story.
Earth 4.2bya was not a place that could have evolved intelligent life as we understand it; and, as we said earlier, this Song 28 just doesn’t care about that.
Forget about the vaunted Drake Equation and the speculations regarding the Fermi Paradox. (Where are all our cognitive, symbolic-reasoning, technological neighbors? Are we really the only ones?)
Our Comfortable Universe’s adamant claim is that if there is or was a Great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire, it is and/or was run by the simplest of single-cell microbes.
It just makes sense.
On Earth, the appearance of the kind of intelligent life that we’re familiar and comfortable with took more than Four Billion Years, and many, many accidents of evolution. THAT seems to be a huge long-shot by comparison to the simple single-celled organisms who have ruled our planet almost since the beginning.
Those—the simple humble microbes—are far more competent space travelers—far more versatile, adaptable, and hardy than our fragile human bodies.
Now ... about that interstellar travel. We go back to Earth 4.2bya: Some of those constant meteor impacts were spewing rocks back out into space. And riding on/in these rocks were our early extremophile organisms. These natural spaceships would have now been travelling the cosmos for 4 billion years.
Buried deep in a cocoon of solid rock, where our organisms are protected from all radiation, these space-farers, who could be traveling upwards of a few hundred kilometers per second (which is 1/1000th the speed of light and is a conservative estimate for the upper limit for how fast such objects could be flung into space from a collision) will have traveled at least 4 million light years already. That means they could have easily reached the Galaxy Andromeda and its 1 trillion stars by now, not to mention potentially seeding life on every single habitable planet in our entire Milky Way.
Conversely, every one of those billion or more habitable planets across the Milky Way probably had their own Hadean Epoch bombardment and their own chemical experiments going on early in their histories; and, we argue, assuming our Earth is nothing too extraordinary, many or most of those planets may also have spawned life, given how quickly it happened here. The resulting ejected objects would be ubiquitous and should be passing through our solar system regularly.
To date, we know of just three interstellar visitors: 1I/Oumuamua (2017), 2I/Borisov (2019) and the recent 3I/ATLAS that is just now exiting our solar system. But we can only see the big ones. There have probably been MANY smaller ones that have escaped detection.
There are several other ways that Cosmic space probes with our simple microbes could have been launched. On the other end of the size scale from planet-bombarding meteors and rocks, astronomers have discovered a handful of ‘hypervelocity stars’ that have been ejected from the Milky Way, probably by encounters with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center. To date, the fastest of these, S5-HVS1, is traveling at 1,755 km/s (3,930,000 mph), almost 0.6% of the speed of light!
If whole stars, probably accompanied by planetary systems, are known to be traveling at speeds easily capable of reaching other galaxies, then how many smaller objects are out there doing the same thing?
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| The Crab Nebula, courtesy of NASA/ESA. Remnants of supernova that exploded in 1054AD, sending material traveling outward at 1500 km per second. |
There are even more violent events going on, which could yield even faster speeds—from supernovas (such as the Crab Nebula shown above) to galaxy collisions (see the opening image).
In terms of intergalactic space travel, our Universe seems to have it covered, folks.
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Now here’s the practical homework problem for us supposedly intelligent life forms: If we are at all serious about establishing an interstellar space program, BY FAR the cheapest, most efficient and most technologically feasible way available for us to get started TODAY is to organize a systematic “search and intercept” system for any interstellar objects that visit our own solar system.
Imagine if Charles Darwin could have collected his samples of species from around the world by simply deploying a big net outside his office rather than embarking on the expensive and time-consuming multi-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.
The long-established practice of collecting light arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos has already proven its worth many times over. We argue that collecting material samples, and especially drill cores that sample the undisturbed interior, from passing interstellar visitors will also prove to have a huge cost-benefit advantage over those dreamed-of deep space expeditions.
What can we expect to find in samples from the visiting interstellar ‘spaceships’?
We won’t know until we look, of course. Regardless of the discovery of any signatures of life, samples from a variety of interstellar objects will be invaluable in improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of … Everything … from stars and their planetary systems through our galaxy’s structure, and even the universe itself.
Here’s a sampler of some of the surprises we could find: The average interstellar object is likely to be old for two reasons. The first is just because the rock had to travel a long way from some other system to get here. But the second could be far more interesting. The universe has been creating rocks for a long time, and those oldest rocks could tell stories of this ancient history that we cannot see with our telescopes.
Even the astounding new discoveries of distant galaxies that the James Webb Space Telescope is making have their limits. There have been tantalizing hints of galaxies that seem far more mature than our Standard Cosmological Model can explain. But the farther back in time you try to look, the fainter and noisier and more distorted the signal is likely to be.
But if the Standard Model is right in assuming that the structure and evolution of the universe is and was the same everywhere, then the same stuff was happening right here in our backyard, and those early events had to leave behind their calling cards—debris from all the chaotic formation and destruction of generations of big and little objects.
Theory says that the first stars did not and could not produce any rocks directly. The best current theories suggest that these first stars were short lived. Many of them exploded within just a few million years, leaving behind the first heavy elements that could then begin to consolidate into the first rocks. But how fast those first rocks might have formed is entirely unknown. That’s one huge reason why a program to seek out and study the interstellar and intergalactic rocks in our neighborhood could be so important.
What science knows about that first generation of stars (stupidly called Population III stars for historical reasons) is sketchy at best, because they have never been observed—not even one of them. They’re long gone, and so the ones we could see in the distant past are just too far away.
Therefore, the speculation about how these stars behaved is entirely based on theory … and the theory that science is using is not equipped to adequately deal with such small things as individual stars. The Standard Model of Cosmology starts from a sweeping assumption of a homogeneous and isotropic universe—smooth and uniform everywhere you look at all scales. It is therefore silent on the subject of the nature of the little local density fluctuations needed to start individual stars forming.
The Standard Model doesn’t even have a good grip on the much bigger density fluctuations that we have evidence for—the observed 1-in-100,000 fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which we discussed at length in Song 25. Those “210-foot-high hills in a 70-mile-wide landscape” produced our observed galaxies and galaxy clusters; but the way they formed and evolved (in the Standard Model) depends on the unknown structure and unknown behavior of the unknown stuff called Dark Matter (*Cold* Dark Matter is specifically assumed in the Standard Model); so, it’s all just more speculation and guesswork.
Getting our hands on one of those extremely old first rocks and studying them would be like travelling 13 billion light years across the universe and back. Talk about precious!
C’mon, NASA! Get those astronauts on your South-Pole Moon Base to work capturing interstellar objects, please! Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense sending missions to land on a future Oumuamua and collecting samples? It seems at least as productive as sending people all the way to Mars.
Meanwhile, explain why it’s smarter to send human beings to Mars *instead* of bringing back the rock samples already collected by Perseverance. And please send a fleet of robotic missions to search for life on Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc.
The world is waiting! We are eager to meet our Intergalactic Companions!
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