LONDON -- The biggest news so far this year is not George W. Bush's plans for intergalactic defense, or even the Code Red virus that was supposed to eat our computers and then our brains. It is the discovery of bugs in the upper atmosphere.
"There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause above which no air from lower down would normally be transported," Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe told the International Society for Optical Engineering in San Diego last week. Wickramasinghe's home base, Cardiff University, says it is "the first positive identification of extra-terrestrial microbial life."
According to Wickramasinghe's 10-person team of scientists, there are living cells in the upper atmosphere of this planet that probably come from space. They are also suggesting that living cells arriving from outer space were the mechanism by which life first arose on this planet -- with the further implications that life exists on almost every planet, and that all life in this galaxy is genetically related.