This is really interesting but I don't see the support for the idea that a bacterium would survive on a rock that a) was violently ejected to escape velocity of some other solar system's living ecosystem, b) further survived for hundreds of millions of years in a dormant state regardless of interstellar radiation, and c) further survived the high-temperature atmospheric entry of our planet and then d) endure the highly-kinetic impact at the end of it all.

Aside from that I have to wonder what the odd are of an individual rock traveling all that way and hitting Earth.

...what would the smartest way to take over a planets resources be, other than, you know...the militant perception most of our powers that be would think of?

Sending in a robot army is costly, and risks tons of resources.
Sending in live forces, would be even more costly.

Now, if you study a planet with life, such as earth, for a very long time, learning whatever you could of it, knowing its strengths and its weaknesses - and if you don't need "human kind", what would you do, to take all of those resources, scot-free with as little effort as possible?

I think Hawking was onto something when he said, if they ever would visit us, and if they had technology superior to ours (which would be obvious since we didn't have the technology to visit them first), they do not have friendly intentions, they are in need of resources.

So - again - what would be the smartest way to go about this?

Most interesting insight is this from the abstract [arxiv.org]: "This discovery enables a new method for studying the composition of interstellar objects, based on spectroscopy of their gaseous debris as they burn up in the Earth's atmosphere."

If you read the article, the compelling science is that (1) they could measure velocities and infer an trajectory which leads to the extra-solar origin, and (2) they can use vaporization spectroscopy to look at the object's chemistry. Now, how they get from good science to sublime idiocy is beyond my comprehension, to wit " Loeb [the Harvard astronomer] says "In principle, life could survive in the core of a rock. Either bacteria, or tardigrades (a microscopic, water-dwelling animal); they can survive harsh conditions in space and arrive right to us..." "

Every time there is some science fad or infatuation with something that has hit the popular media, everyone wants to explain everything in that light. Tardigrades travel on interstellar space rocks and thereby populate foreign solar systems. Really !? WTF. Sounds like Professor Loeb needs to stick to the experimental rather than the theoretical side of the aisle.

Another comment here stated "Can we stop with the idiotic panspermia ideas? It's completely stupid." That is probably true. Organic molecules are common. The possibility that chemistry, then biochemistry, and even the most primordial life could travel on meteorites over vast distances and maintain their active chemical potentials is plausible enough, even to the point that certain RNA's or DNA's or even bacteria like organisms could have made the journey safely. But those evolutionary systems are presumably common, it is after all just chemistry, so if it happened over there, then it happened right here, no need to invoke flying microbes to explain the origin of life here. Also, life is a bootstrap process. Put even the simplest bacterium or green algae into a sterile world, and nothing will happen, because the infrastructure chemistry, enzymes, and energy coupling reactions are not there. To get the right soup to allow even the simplest microbe the opportunity to respire, move, acquire substrate and energy, and reproduce, took 2 billion years to develop on this planet.

But rock riding higher taxa - no. Complex life on this planet is presumed to have developed because of numerous planetary happenstances, including things like tidal and orbital stability from the moon and biochemical evolution of an appropriate atmosphere. By the time any of that could have happened, our solar system was a fairly settled place, the chances of a huge collision already profoundly diminished as the early bodies had all been gravitationally amalgamated or already ejected. To get the escape velocity needed to send a rock to another star would require huge impact energies that even the Chixilub event probably did not have - although anybody knowing the numbers please chime in. Not that such impacts could not happen, they could, but so much less likely by the time that higher multicellular taxa had had a chance to evolve.

Tardigrades appear in the fossil record about 530 million years ago - they are just kids. Research that has taken tardigrades to space and exposed them to desiccation and radiation show that hey can survive amazing conditions, but only so long. A ten day experiment is not the same as a 100,000 year meteorite ride. And those little buggers did not do well in space exposed to radiation, so 100K years in cosmic ray environment is not tenable. So, the good professor is implying that some higher order creepy crawly got entombed in a rock big enough to shield it, in a collision of astronomically small likelihood, then spent eons floating in cosmic space, to land here and establish a new phylum on this planet. One can never say "never", but it taxes credulity.

It would be a more respectable position if it was not one of those chi chi "science of the moment" fads. When the kids of South Park recently used dancing tardigrades for a science project, it was funny. When Star Trek Discovery used a giant grizzly tardigrade as a mushroom munching hyper light speed atomic fart pile to propel the space craft, it was downright moronic. But they all used tardigrades because TG's a