Last week, I asked, “In what sense is origin of life a scientific question?” I’d been reading an informative paper by Prof. Robert Endres of Imperial College London. He demonstrates the sheer unlikelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from non-life on Earth. He also asks whether intelligent extraterrestrials might have seeded Earth with life:

While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia — originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel — remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics.

“The unreasonable likelihood of being: origin of life, terraforming, and AI” by Robert G. Endres, 24 July 2025, arXiv. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2507.18545 July 25, 2025

Yes, genome mapper Francis Crick (1916–2004) and origin of life theorist Leslie Orgel (1927–2007) did propose that in 1973: “In their scenario, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, facing extinction or perhaps scientific curiosity, dispatches microbial “starter kits” to habitable planets like ours.”

Is panspermia (life from space) gaining ground?

Mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) considered it plausible that life originated elsewhere in space (whether or not it was delivered here by ET):

In 1977 Hoyle and I argued that the origin of life on Earth must have involved the importation of viable cells from space, thereby challenging another Holy Grail of science, “The Primordial Soup Theory”, for the origins of life. At first this theory, known as “panspermia”, was regarded as heretical, but new evidence from many directions appears be moving towards a vindication of this point of view…

Now, 34 years on, some form of panspermia theory of life’s origins appears to be gaining ground.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Hoyle’s work involves the ideas of pathogenic bacteria and viruses arriving from space, and that the evolution of life may be directed from outside. This work has raised fierce hostility in some circles.

Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Sir Fred Hoyle,” SETI League, August 23, 2001

Is panspermia (life from space) gaining ground? It might be more accurate to say that, of twenty terrestrial origin of life theories, none is more persuasive on the evidence. That may account, in part, for the hostility that Wickramasinghe notes. A sense, perhaps, that the life from space theorists must be put down. But, frustratingly, they can’t be put down on the evidence.

What makes a question scientific?

Image Credit: Thuch - Adobe Stock

In my post last week, I did not say directly whether I thought terrestrial origin of life (OOL) was a scientific question. That’s because it depends on where you stand on a prior question: Can OOL be a scientific question even if the answer can never be known?

It’s not clear that a terrestrial OOL can ever be determined by scientific means. Time travel is likely impossible. So the best that researchers can do is this:

1. Come up with plausible ways that life could originate. But, short of a time machine, we cannot know what actually happened and that’s what we want to know. That puts OOL in the same category as many mysteries in the history of life. How did the mammals, reptiles, etc. survive the asteroid hit when the dinosaurs died out? For that matter, who was Jack the Ripper? The precise answers are likely lost forever in time.
2. As intelligent beings, we can perhaps design a system that works “spontaneously” to produce life. But that will not show that the workings of that system (without us) were a historical fact three billion years ago. It only shows that intelligent designers can produce a system that “spontaneously” produces life. Hence the attractiveness of directed panspermia (ET created us).

However, if we accept that the use of the methods of science on a question makes it a scientific one — irrespective of whether we can ever answer the question definitively — then yes, origin of life qualifies.

Now let’s look at panspermia: Life from space

As I noted last week, we’re allowed to consider that intelligent design may have got life going provided we locate it somewhere between Star Wars and Star Trek. Thus an idea developed by rigorous scientists facing the awful complexity of life’s origin shares cultural attention with Marvin the Martian, the Monolith, and the Borg.

Drowning in kitsch and pop culture is cruel and unusual punishment for a thesis. It’s also a bit misleading. Some versions of panspermia assume that life originated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe and randomly traveled to Earth on friendly comets or asteroids. That thesis, of course, kicks the problem of how life got started into orbit, which is not friendly to any resolution of the question.

But the thesis that life might have been seeded by intelligent aliens has a genuine advantage over any claims for spontaneous generation three billion years ago: the advantage the future always has over the past. We can never know for sure what happened in the remote past. But future discoveries could, in principle, either strengthen or confirm the life from space claim.

Researchers scan the skies constantly and something could turn up any day. What turns up might be intelligent life. Or even intelligent life that admits, regretfully, that it is the culprit in creating life on Earth, thus kicking off the current chaos…

Okay, that last one is really a stretch. But the future remains more fertile than the past because it hasn’t happened yet. So life from space is a scientific question if we stick to scientific reasoning.

One thing emerges clearly from the life from space approach: Intelligent design is a viable hypothesis for the origin of life.