Had a villain thought today.
Apparently, some spores are able to survive in space if shielded from UV radiation.
So what if human start shooting massive amounts of mushroom spores into space and other planets? Spores will be stored in small space pods. Batches of tens of thousands of spore pods could be launched at once. It’ll eventually land on asteroid, and even other planets. Some will survive, adapt, and evolve. We will infect many worlds as we can with mushrooms and fungus.
It seems inevitable without even considering villains. Accidents happen.
That is the basis of the Panspermia Theory, meaning that life can hitch a ride on asteroids and is abundant in the universe. And I'm a firm proponent of the Forced Panspermia, where instead of sterilising spacecraft and probes we go out of our way to spread bacteria and lifeforms that might survive on planets and moons of our solar system. For example, we sent a probe to Saturn and we made sure to crash it in a way that didn't interfere with any possible life on the planet. I think it was a wasted opportunity to pollinate it, we won't be sending anything back there for decades. Imagine if in 300 years we'd pollinated a few planets and moons and things had started to grow naturally.
I was thinking about this too. I’ve heard a lot of work goes into preventing contamination but why not load up the mars rover with a ton of hardy bacteria and scatter them everywhere on the planet?
