It is THE head-scratching biological question of time and space: the origin of life on Earth.

The spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry, notes Robert G. Endres of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College in London.

Endres leads the Complex Adaptive and Living Matter (CALM) group at the college, and a noted expert on systems biology.

Coming out party

In a new research paper — “The unreasonable likelihood of being – Origin of life, terraforming, and AI” – Endres explores one provocative idea – the Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials.

“While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia,” Endres explains, “remains a speculative but logically open alternative.”

Indeed, revealing the physical principles for life’s spontaneous coming out party is an imposing challenge for biological physics.

In his recently released paper, Endres points to panspermia, originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (two leading researchers delving into early life; Crick with James Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953) “remains a speculative but logically open alternative,” he writes.

Image credit: NASA

Starter kits

Crick and Orgel detailed the directed panspermia view within journal, Icarus, back in 1973, a seminal paper melding cosmology, chemistry and biology.

In their Icarus paper, Crick and Orgel raised the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the Earth by intelligent beings from another planet. “We conclude that it is possible that life reached the Earth in this way,” they wrote, “but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability.”

Endres writes in his new paper, in the Crick and Orgel scenario, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, facing extinction or perhaps scientific curiosity, dispatches microbial “starter kits” to other worlds, like Earth.

Terraforming Mars would require warming the atmosphere to enable engineered microbes to create oxygen through photosynthesis, which would further allow for slow oxygen build-up to support liquid water and more complex life.
Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Silent governance of physics

Queries Endres: “Which returns us, cautiously but irresistibly, to the question: Was Earth terraformed, or did order coalesce from chaos under the silent governance of physics?”

Even at present, there is serious work concerning the terraforming of Mars or Venus.

“If advanced civilizations exist, it is not implausible they might attempt similar interventions—out of curiosity, necessity, or design,” suggests Endres.

“Still, Occam’s razor weighs in: abiotic evolution, however slow and strange, remains a viable (if mind-bending) explanation. Invoking terraforming adds explanatory complexity without constraint. And while we cannot prove that abiogenesis is inevitable, it remains consistent with thermodynamics,” Endres concludes.

Abiogenesis is the idea that life arose from nonlife more than 3.5 billion years ago on Earth.

To access the paper – “The unreasonable likelihood of being: Origin of life, terraforming, and AI” – go to:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18545

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