
"While Imperial College London professor of systems biology Robert Endres concedes that the emergence of life still could've been the result of chemical reactions moving from highly disordered to ordered arrangements, as Universe Today reports, he's also leaving open to that much more exotic possibility. The "aliens did it" hypothesis would "violate Occam's razor," Endres admitted in his yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, but he refuses to rule it out as a "speculative but logically open alternative.""
"Push the idea one step further, and you land on "directed panspermia": the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization deliberately brought life to Earth. The theory was first proposed in the early 1970s to explain the incredible unlikeliness of life on Earth. Even at the time, the authors - including molecular biologist Francis Crick, famous for discovering the helical structure of DNA, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies chemist Leslie Orgel - admitted that "scientific evidence" was "inadequate" to "say anything about the probability.""
A framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity estimates the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under plausible prebiotic conditions. The calculations indicate that a purely random primordial soup would be too lossy to reliably generate the informational complexity required for living systems. Panspermia refers to life spreading via natural celestial bodies, while directed panspermia posits deliberate seeding by an extraterrestrial civilization. Directed panspermia remains a logically open alternative despite violating Occam's razor. The directed panspermia idea was proposed in the early 1970s, with its originators acknowledging that scientific evidence was inadequate to assess probability.
Read at Futurism
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