It would be mind-numbingly short sighted if we spent hundreds of millions to go to a comet, collect dust from it and from space at large, return it to Earth, and not be at least technically able to confirm a theory by a Nobel prize winner (Dr. Svante Arrhenius) that spores should be found in space.

Please don't tell me that LCROSS would be unable to detect organics even if they were present. 80 Million dollars just for a single shot detect only water?….can't be.

If you want conclusive results, you need to send scientists and their equipment.

A lot of scientists probably. Unless you can find readily available fossils or evidence for life, such as Mars methane isotope ratios, the usual rate of find will likely apply. And I seem to remember a paleontologist complain that the likelihood that any one of them actually find a fossil in his lifetime was less than 1.

If that is correct we have to prepare to sink at least ~ 30 man-years, or more probably hundreds of them, on the first fossil alone, not mentioning the likely necessary repeats to make sure. I think we have a reason why a longtime Mars outpost would be a good idea.

Wickramasinghe is of course riding on the work stemming from the crackpot period of Hoyle, were he entertained creationist ideas and most famously the model error of the "junkyard". [In fact, I just heard that he held to steady state cosmology to the very end, despite the evidence against, in true crackpot fashion.] It doesn't seem to concern him that ~ 1 million year is way to short compared to the accretion and crust formation times of the planets. Maybe Earth itself was faster, I've seen ~ 50 My mentioned, but at least Mars was mentioned at ~ 100 My (IIRC from Mars meteorite evidence) recently. That potential frozen life would be fertile after such long times is an unproven stretch to say the least. Current record seems to be 1.2 My.

1 million years, that's a *very* short time for life to evolve, even bacterial.

Why? I think it was Miller himself who put an upper limit on sea life formation time to 13 ky. (On account of the average time it takes for sea water to become sterilized in heat vents.) And AFAIU calculated that his then prefered model of ice-thaw cycles would satisfy the condition.

[Note that stationary abiogenesis spots, such as the hydrothermal vent theory, don't labor under that condition.]

Any form of bacteria is much different from first life.

If transpermia holds, then any life found anywhere other then Earth would probably tell the tale.

Considering the difficulties to reach deep divergencies with any sort of resolution, I think it's unlikely. And even so it would be very difficult to distinguish between non-transpermia, Earth-Mars transpermia or vice versa, or an earlier shared cometary origin, or a few or all of the later.

Btw, I don't think chirality will tell much, as we don't know if foreign life will be chiral or even if early life was. When a genetic system evolves to interact with metabolism it is beneficial but not strictly necessary. One could imagine having doubled genetic systems. Same goes for metabolic systems as such.

[Even today everything from bacteria to eykaryotes have enzymes that takes compounds from one chirality to the other, so in that regard there is "doubled metabolic and genetic systems". Sometimes probably to rectify inevitable spontaneous chirality change so metabolism can work on it. Sometimes specifically to produce the reverse chirality as it has other biological function. Apparently we each have a bunch of reverse chirality compounds. AFAIU this field has exploded in medicine since ~ 2000.]

too many independant thinkers, too much budget potential, too much positive PR potential, the list goes on… but it comes down to the main fact that people wouldn't be able to keep their mouths shut about it.

If you want conclusive results, you need to send scientists and their equipment. Otherwise even the proper readings from a probe can be dismissed as sensor errors simply because we don't know what we're looking for.

That being what it is, searching the more habitable planets that have been dusted with the same ice as earth might be more fruitful (and easier) than chasing comets.

Which comet probes had the capacity to detect life on comets?

what?

The harm that might be done by a returned microbe from Mars is a risk, but the harm that is being done by this slow "scientific" effort will someday tear society apart.