ALIEN ORIGINS Did life come from space? Scientists want to find out if aliens settled on Earth after travelling from another galaxy

Researchers want to discover if tiny organisms could survive journey through space and 'seed' planets with life.

SCIENTISTS are planning to to test out a theory which suggests life on Earth arrived here from another planet or galaxy.

Stargazers linked to the pioneering Breakthrough Starshot initiative want to see if it’s possible for living organisms to survive the ravages of the void.

Did alien lifeforms settle on Earth and begin the process of evolution?

They want to test out an idea called “panspermia” which hypothesises that life exists throughout the universe and is carried around on meteors, asteroids or even alien spacecraft.

Advocates of this theory claim that the building blocks of life – or even small organisms like bacteria – crashed onto our planet and kickstarted the evolution of every animal and plant on Earth.

Jeff Kuhn, a physicist at the University of Hawaii, works with the Breakthrough Initiative, which is also backed by Professor Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg.

The $100 million (£77 million) project is hoping to blast tiny, sail-equipped probes with lasers to accelerate them to 20% of the speed of light so they can zoom to nearby star systems like Proxima Centauri.

Kuhn wants to put small colonies of bacteria on one of the tiny spaceships to see if it can survive a odyssey through the vacuum of space.

It's believed one type of bacteria called Bacillus subtilis can survive in space for up to six years.

"I think it would be fun, on one of these disposable chips, to put a little colony of Bacillus, send it for 20 years, turn it on, give it some nutrients and see if it's still alive, just to experimentally decide whether or not panspermia works over interstellar distances," Kuhn said, according to Space.com.

Mars may have once been home to living organisms.

The boffin also wants to blend human DNA into the genome of a small roundworm called C. elegans to see if it can be put to sleep and then awakened at the end of its journey.

This sort of process will be familiar to viewers of the sci-fi films like Alien, where it's called stasis.

"A part of our program — at least on the NASA side, because we haven't cleared this with Breakthrough yet — is actually to put organisms to sleep, in stasis mode," Lubin added.

"And there are certain organisms known as C. elegans, which we’re going to embed human DNA into and send them out and then awaken them on arrival.

"However, I expect that will be a highly controversial thing to do."

Earlier this year it was claimed that life came from Mars and was carried to Earth on an asteroid.

Sources: THE Sun