From Dr. Becky.

One of the central ideas in Project Hail Mary is that life can spread between star systems, a real scientific idea idea known as Panspermia that suggests that microbial life can travel between planets and stars on asteroids or even tiny dust grains to eventually spawn life on other planets, giving all life a common origin. That’s not as crazy as it sounds, first of all we know material can move between planets. For example, we have meteorites on Earth that originated on Mars. And we know that some asteroids get ejected from the solar system, we’ve even had asteroids visiting from other star systems passing through the solar system, what’s known as interstellar objects. Plus we know that life can survive in extremely hostile environments, from deep ocean pressures and extreme temperatures on Earth, but also intense radiation and the vacuum of space. The FOTON-M3 mission showed that Tardigrades were able to survive exposure to space’s vacuum for 10 days, and once brought back to Earth were still able to reproduce. So this idea of panspermia is becoming more popular with astrobiologists actively studying whether life could survive those conditions for long periods of time. So the idea of astrophage travelling across interstellar distances to infect other stars, isn’t a proven idea, but also isn’t too big of a leap from established scientific ideas….
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👩🏽‍💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about black holes, cosmology, dark matter, the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the biggest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.

http://drbecky.uk.com