Aliens May Have Started Life on Earth — A Scientist Offers Evidence

The idea that aliens may have started life on Earth sounds like pure science fiction. It suggests a universe where life did not simply arise in a warm pond, deep-sea vent, or ancient chemical environment, but arrived here from somewhere else. Even more dramatically, one version of the idea proposes that intelligent beings may have deliberately seeded Earth with life.

This is not the mainstream explanation for life’s origin. Most scientists still focus on abiogenesis, the idea that life emerged naturally from non-living chemistry on the early Earth. But biologist Robert Endres of Imperial College London has argued that the odds of life forming so quickly may be stranger than we assume, leading him to revisit directed panspermia — a controversial idea once proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel.