Abstract
Three recent discoveries support the existence of an extra-planetary, cometary biosphere that is capable of
spanning the galaxy: 1) the discovery of ancient cyanobacterial fossils on carbonaceous chondrites, which are
widely believed to be extinct comets, 2) the observations and theory that all short-period comets have irreversibly
differentiated by melting and undergo periodic remeltings, and, 3) the observation that comets can accrete inner
solar-system material, including spores from other infected comets. While no direct observation of sub-cellular,
fossilized viruses exist, their ubiquity and proximity with cyanobacteria suggest that the proposed cometary
biosphere also carries a full complement of bacteriophages. Recent work transcribing viral DNA of bacteriophages
reveals an active horizontal transfer of genes though a vector that doesn't itself benefit from the genes. Thus the
cometary biosphere is capable of transporting genes throughout the galaxy that are not themselves expressed
in space, suggesting that evolution may occur not just in time, but in space as well, making the Earth and its
history less significant for a cosmological theory of evolution. That is, evolution is driven not by innovation, but
by communication, albeit at a slow cometary speed and the transfer of a life ecosystem through a low bitrate
channel can be modelled as a bootstrap process. Thus cometary evolution suggests that the history of earth
represents the spatial relativity of a bootstrap process at the speed of life.
