Imperial College scientist advances directed panspermia hypothesis for origin of life on Earth

A scientist at Imperial College London has put forth a provocative preprint arguing that an extraterrestrial intervention — directed panspermia — could explain the rapid emergence of life on early Earth.

Robert Endres posted the paper to the preprint server arXiv, using mathematical estimates and computer models to assess how much "biological information" would be required to assemble the first protocells and how long a purely random chemical process on early Earth would need to accumulate that information. The paper concludes that, in the author's view, achieving the necessary molecular order by natural processes within the available time could have been unlikely, and that intentional delivery of microbes or genetic material by an advanced civilization is a plausible alternative.

Endres frames his argument in information-theoretic terms. He constructs a simplified formula intended to balance the entropy of a primordial "chemical soup" against the information content needed to build DNA, proteins and the spatial arrangements that characterize a minimal protocell. Using assumptions about the lifetimes of complex molecules in early-Earth conditions and rates at which useful molecular complexity could emerge, he estimates a timescale of roughly 500 million years to assemble a basic cell by undirected chemistry alone. He argues that maintaining the highly specific sequence and structural information required for life over such an extended, uninterrupted period is improbable without an external seeding event.

The author also discusses the historical idea of directed panspermia, first proposed in the 1970s by scientists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, who suggested that life on Earth could have been intentionally introduced by extraterrestrial agents. Endres writes that, given modern human discussion of deliberate terraforming of Mars or Venus in the scientific literature, it is not implausible that an advanced civilization might try similar interventions elsewhere for curiosity, necessity or design.

Endres cautions that the hypothesis is hard to prove without physical evidence of extraterrestrial technology or a demonstrable signature of an intentional seeding event. The paper is a theoretical exercise that combines crude estimates of information requirements with assumptions about prebiotic chemistry and molecular stability; it has not undergone peer review. Independent scientists contacted for comment in media coverage noted that results relying on large parameter assumptions can be highly sensitive to input values and modeling choices.

Alternative hypotheses for the origin of life remain active areas of research. Some researchers favor an endogenous origin in which simple organic molecules assembled and were energized by sources such as lightning, hydrothermal vents or mineral surfaces. Others emphasize the exogenous delivery of organic compounds by meteorites and comets, or energy supplied by uncommon but plausible events. Recent work from Stanford researchers has proposed microscale electrical sparks produced by water droplets colliding at shorelines as a potential energy source for early chemical synthesis.

The new preprint also appears against the backdrop of official U.S. government assessments. A 2024 Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena and potential biosignatures found no evidence confirming extraterrestrial visitation or technology. Endres acknowledges that current empirical evidence does not indicate the presence of alien actors in Earth's past.

Experts in origins-of-life research say that multiple approaches — laboratory experiments, geochemical investigations of the oldest rocks, and searches for biosignatures beyond Earth — are needed to constrain how life began. Endres's paper calls attention to the role that informational constraints might play in those debates but does not supply direct observations or physical artifacts to support directed panspermia.

The preprint encourages further study of the information content required for minimal cellular systems and of the rates at which complexity can emerge and persist under varied prebiotic scenarios. It also underscores the continued uncertainty about one of science's oldest questions: how nonliving chemistry became organized into the first living systems on Earth.