William Schopf and colleagues from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin analyzed microorganisms, from Western Australia that are 3.465 billion years old. The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history means that life formed on Earth over just a few hundred million years after it cooled enough to hold water 3.8 billion years ago. This would seem to be quick for it to be a random event and their may be an explanation for why it happened so fast.
Past research suggests that dehydrated bacteria and space dust may be one in the same. This idea has long been ridiculed, but in light of the recent Schopf study it may not be so ridiculous after all.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's Analysis of Interstellar Dust :
"After trying almost everything else first, in 1979, they looked at the spectrum for bacteria. Dried bacteria refract light as irregular hollow spheres, and their size range is appropriate. The match between the spectrum for dried bacteria (solid line) and the ones from the interstellar grains (dots, triangles and squares) was nearly perfect. Thinking without prejudice, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe concluded the grains probably were dried, frozen bacteria (10)."
I am going to do a bit more research on this and follow it up with a more thorough article. I find this fascinating and hope you will follow up with me.