The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or LIFE, is scheduled to be launched in October and includes specimens of thale cress and brewer's yeast, and a microbe known as Conan the Bacterium. The experiment isdesigned to show if living organisms can survive unprotected in space for long periods and thus support the theory of panspermia, which argues that simple organisms can survive for years as they float through space and that life on Earth could have been wafted here from another world.