The Chinese are building a radical, game-changing propulsion technology. It converts electrical energy into thrust via microwaves. It will revolutionize satellites and space probes. It could get us to Mars in less than two months!

There’s just one little thing:

To say that the “Emdrive” (short for “electromagnetic drive”) concept is controversial would be an understatement. According to Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who developed the concept, the drive converts electrical energy into thrust via microwaves, without violating any laws of physics. Many researchers believe otherwise. An article about the Emdrive in New Scientist magazine drew a massive volley of criticism. Scientists not only argued that Shawyer’s work was blatantly impossible, and that his reasoning was flawed. They also said the article should never have been published.

Hmmm… The linked article goes on to say that the scientist who developed the idea stands by his work. So we’ll see. Looks like a pretty big longshot, though.

Well, at least that’s how the headline reads.

This was a cool experiment: they fastened rocks covered with both fossilized and living bacteria to the heat shield of a Russian space probe which re-entered the atmosphere. The results? The living bacteria got totally fried, but soe of the fossils came through.

So the experiment lends credence to the idea that this rock, which has been identified as coming from Mars really could have fossilized bacteria on it:

But it would appear that these results deal a harsh blow to the theory of panspermia, the idea that life was carried to earth in the form of microbes hitching a ride on meteors. I would tend to argue that the experiment confirms that re-entry is a violent and traumatic process, and suggests that if panspermia did occur, those microbes were embedded pretty deep in the meteor that brought them. It would have needed to be more than two centimeters deep, per the results of the experiment.

That sounds pretty deep, but I’m guessing that there is bacteria on this planet embedded a lot more deeply in rock than that. In fact, they should split those rocks open and see if there isn’t something else living insided, something that was never intended to be part of the experiment.

Now that would be evidence for life traveling through space.