Could Earth have sent life to Jupiter's moon Europa?

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Could Earth have seeded Jupiter's moon Europa with bacterial life, where it could have taken hold in Europa's ocean and perhaps evolved into something more? That's the hypothesis of a new paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology by Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia.

Osmanov calculates the chance that dust particles containing living bacteria were ejected from Earth's gravitational well and traveled to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, where they could have landed undestroyed and made their way through cracks in Europa's ice, beneath which lies a vast sea that scientists believe could harbor life.

The possibility of panspermia, bringing simple life to Earth from elsewhere in the universe, has been discussed for decades. Dust, meteoroids, asteroids and comets might all have contained life forms as they crashed into Earth.

The hypothesis is impossible to test experimentally, but in a paper published in the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Osmanov, who is also affiliated with the E. Kharadze Georgian National Astrophysical Observatory, calls this the "reverse panspermia problem" and calculated that "in 5 billion years dust grains can travel in the interstellar medium at distances of the order of hundreds of parsecs."

Also, given the distribution of stars in the Milky Way, "particles emitted by every single planet will reach as many as 105 stellar systems." Moreover, Osmanov found that from a single planet, life can be transported to about a thousand star systems.

Using techniques similar to those in his earlier paper, Osmanov considered Earth as an origin of dust grains, and Europa, with its unique ice and ocean features, as their end point. Osmanov breaks his analysis into three parts:

Dust particles about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size can contain packed bacteria of about the same size. Moreover, for the bacteria to survive any journey, their temperature cannot exceed about 300 Kelvin (about 27°C).

Dust grains are carried aloft by atmospheric turbulence; considering the energy imparted to one at 150 kilometers (93 miles) in altitude, as through a collision with cosmic dust, Osmanov's 2025 paper allowed him to calculate a maximum imparted velocity of the dust grain of 14 km/s at altitude, which exceeds Earth's escape velocity of 11.2 km/s.

More simple physics shows the particle would have a velocity of 8.4 km/s whe