The idea that life may safely travel through
space may seem kind of strange, but recent evidence
suggests it might not be impossible.
NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility was used
to perform an experiment to see how long bacteria
could survive in space.
The viability of bacteria in the experiment
was much larger than was expected.
In other words, some bacteria hardly seemed
to even notice that they had been in space
for 6 years! This was a small but significant
fraction of the bacteria.