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Title: The Original Martian Invasion (21 Apr 2017)
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| Episode credited cast: | |||
| Rachel Bloom | ... | Self | |
| Moogega Cooper | ... | Self - Panelist | |
| Randy Couture | ... | Tardigrade | |
| Marcus Lindsey | ... | The Crab | |
| Bill Nye | ... | Self - Host | |
| Hunter Pence | ... | Self - Guest | |
| Andy Rossi | ... | Tardigrade's Victim | |
Bill introduces the theory of panspermia (which is the hypothesis that life exist throughout the Universe), NASA scientists discuss the Mars 2020 mission, and Wil Wheaton and the panel ponder life on other planets.
1) The table discussion at the end is not very useful. In particular, Wil Wheaton is not a scientist, he is an actor and science fiction fan.
2) The description of how life might have traveled to Earth ignores the "Aerobic divide." Initial life on Earth would have to be able to thrive without free oxygen. When photosynthesis developed, oxygen would have killed most of the existing organisms. Life continued to evolve from there.
That means panspermia would have required delivery of a mixture of photosynthetic cells and cells that would not be killed by oxygen. This is an advanced collection of single cellular organisms, not the organism mentioned in the episode.
3) The original experiment did not explain much (it was a fake creation of primordial soup). Primordial soup would have allowed reactions to generate a variety of chemicals, but nothing life-like would appear until some sort of envelope (cell membrane) developed to separate the proto-cell from the soup.