A meteorite that recently landed close to a city in Sri Lanka may be "the most important scientific discovery in the last 500 years" since it brought "compelling evidence of life" from space.

On the Island website, Walter Jayawardhana quotes one of the scientists who discovered the contents of the meteorite as saying, "We report here the first compelling evidence for life existing outside the earth." This supports the theory that life came to Earth (and maybe other planets as well) by hitchhiking on asteroids from far corners of the universe.
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There’s a reason we’ve sent a rover called "Curiosity" up to Mars: Astronomers want to prove the theory that microorganisms on an asteroid from Mars that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago may have started life here. We do know that fragments from distant planets might have been the "sprouts of life" on this one. Mars may now be dead (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we may live on as the progeny of that planet.
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It’s been discovered that DNA can travel on a meteorite, meaning that life on Earth could have been seeded from another planet–maybe even Mars. If that’s the case, we don’t need to look for life on Mars–we’re looking at it every time we see another human being!

On the MSNBC website, Charles Q. Choi quotes chemist Jim Cleaves as saying, "People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin or not."
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