A wild new theory has claimed the origins of life on Earth were delivered by aliens who were terraforming the planet into a habitable world billions of years ago.
Robert Endres, a scientist from Imperial College London, said that the building blocks of life on Earth might be too complex to have formed naturally, meaning they would have needed something (or someone) to help kickstart the process.
This idea, known as directed panspermia, suggests that aliens might have sent microbes or simple life forms to Earth to propel evolution, forever changing humanity's view of where life comes from.
Endres theorized that this would have happened around 4.2 billion years ago, shortly after Earth cooled and water formed, with extraterrestrials potentially using a spacecraft or probes to deliver microbial 'starter kits' to the young planet.
The scientist added that the natural formation of life without any help was unlikely because the amount of chemical 'order' needed to form the first simple cells would have been too much to come together in just 500 million years.
This theory could rewrite current science by challenging the traditional view that life emerged from a chemical soup through chance, suggesting instead an intentional act by an unknown intelligence.
'Today, humans seriously contemplate terraforming Mars or Venus in scientific journals,' Endres wrote.
'If advanced civilizations exist, it is not implausible they might attempt similar interventions — out of curiosity, necessity, or design.'
A new study has claimed that aliens played a role in the origins of life on Earth (Stock Image)
Researcher Robert Endres said the formation of complex cells billions of years ago would have been too unlikely without help to kickstart the process
While a working theory, the US Pentagon released a 2024 report showing no evidence of alien life.
Directed panspermia, as first proposed by scientists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel in the 1970s, suggested that an advanced alien civilization could have intentionally sent life to Earth, directing its formation to fit their purposes.
The idea is that these microbes would land, survive, and kickstart life, which could then evolve into more complex forms over time.
Endres saw this as a way to explain life’s early appearance on Earth, though he noted it’s hard to prove without evidence of the aliens or their technology.
The new study on the pre-print server Arxiv, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, used math and computer models to estimate the 'information' required to build the first cells on Earth
Endres compared the information in these chemical building blocks to the 'bits' of a computer, meaning that specific instructions were needed to arrange DNA and the shapes of proteins into a working protocell.
Endres created a simple formula to estimate the balance between the chaos of early Earth's chemical soup and the order needed for a protocell to emerge.
He guessed the amount of useful biological information in this soup and how long complex molecules could last before breaking down.
Scientists don't yet agree on how exactly life on Earth began, but some suspect that it started with microbes being delivered from space on meteorites
If DNA did not come from space, Endres said it would have taken a consistent process taking place over 500 million years to form basic cells (Stock Image)
Then, he calculated how much DNA and protein information a protocell would need and how fast it would need to build up over time into complex lifeforms.
The experiment found that the rate at which useful information could be gathered from the chemical soup was about 100 bits per second, a much higher rate than the two bits per year humans think is required to build basic cells.
While Endres' model showed that life could have formed on its own billions of years ago, it still would have taken roughly 500 million years for this process to finally build up enough organic building blocks to form complex cells.
The study author contended that the odds were incredibly remote that such a random process would stay so consistent over that period without some kind of outside help.
Other theories of how life began on Earth have focused on vital compounds for organic life being deposited here by chance encounters with meteorites, and lightning bolts giving them the energy to create new organisms.
Meanwhile, some scientists have argued that life didn't need thousands of super-charged lightning strikes or meteors to kickstart the planet.
Scientists from Stanford University have theorized that tiny 'microlightning' sparks from water droplets crashing against the shores generated the electrical energy needed to mix with organic particles in the early atmosphere.