Contact-Induced Abiogenesis Risk and Bidirectional Planetary Protection

Current planetary protection frameworks model contamination risk as organism survival during transfer between bodies. This paper proposes a distinct and unmodelled risk category: contact-induced template cascade assembly, in which physical contact between Earth chemistry and extraterrestrial mineral templates — or vice versa — may trigger directed molecular assembly without requiring living organisms to be present or survive. The mechanism is grounded in documented mechanotransduction and mineral pore templating in terrestrial abiogenesis research. A bidirectional quarantine corollary follows: 277 confirmed Martian meteorites have already been recovered on Earth, constituting a continuous confirmed inbound transfer of extraterrestrial template geometry to Earth chemistry. Current protocols address only the outbound direction. This paper proposes template information transfer as a third contamination category alongside organism transfer and chemical toxicity, and argues that planetary protection policy is structurally incomplete without it.