Fascinating! Would vira or bacteria beable to survive travelling from Earth to Mars in or on a rock or vice versa?

Tardigrades do survive in space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

Roughly quoting Neal de Grasse Tyson: Since so many bacteria survive outer space there is a good chance it's because of - yes - survivor bias. If only because early earth was bombarded so often that fragments of the planet with microbes took of in a meteor strike and returned home after a while in space.

Short answer: almost certainly yes, although i presume this is an improbable event.

It's not that improbable. They've found meteorites on Earth that have been identified as having come from Mars based on their mineral contents.

Sure, I was referring to the part where the microbe survives the initial blast, the passage through space, reentry, and landing, and happens to land in a spot where it can survive.

According to some research, microbes survival in meteorites is very likely (if they exist)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11543506/

I know enough biology to be skeptical of papers like that (although, I admit I was skeptical when papers from the 50s predicted interplanetary mass transport, and didn't change my mind until we found Martian meteorites). I'd like to see actual evidence of this.

I actually think the rock getting into space with the microbe embedded in it is not that unlikely (many rocks in the earth are laced with bacteria), nor the space transport. I think the excessive heat of rentry, the force of impact, and the difference in target ecosystems are what are going to kill the microbes.

Possible, but cross-section for collision is way way smaller in the Earth-Mars system. Cross-section goes as r^-2 so the closer the bodies, the 'way better' it is.

IIRC, that is a serious hypothesis for how life began on earth, seeded from elsewhere (maybe not Mars).

But certainly someone here knows more than I do about it ...

The theory is called Panspermia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Considering the time scales involved, it wouldn't surprise me if multiple planets around nearby stars happened to be seeded with earth based bacterial/archaea life.