"Impact Delivery of Pre-Biotic Organic Matter to Planetary Surfaces"
It is becoming increasingly clear that impacts affected the evolution of the Earth's biosphere. Hypotheses put forward range from impact annihilation of life to panspermia. In particular, the suggestion that asteroid and comet impacts may have delivered a substantial fraction of Earth's pre-biotic inventory of organic is nearly a century old. Besides Earth, Mars and Europa have been indicated as probable planetary bodies where life as we know it could have originated during the lifetime of the solar system. This talk summarizes the outcomes of numerical modeling aimed at understanding how impact cratering of large bodies may have affected the pre-biotic inventory of Earth, Mars, and Europa, and will briefly discuss the case of the Moon.