The proposal, put forward by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel in Icarus in 1973, that life on Earth was deliberately seeded by an extraterrestrial civilisation, offered by them as a hypothesis worth stating rather than one they claimed to have established. It sits inside a longer panspermia tradition running from Anaxagoras through Svante Arrhenius to Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who argued for cometary delivery of biological material. The modern reference point in the alternative literature is a 2018 paper by Edward Steele and thirty-two co-authors in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, “Cause of the Cambrian Explosion, Terrestrial or Cosmic?”, which argued for cosmic input into the Cambrian radiation and for the octopus as a candidate arrival. The paper passed peer review and was criticised heavily on publication, the octopus argument in particular, and it represents a minority position descended from Hoyle and Wickramasinghe rather than a shift in the field. The entry is worth holding because directed panspermia is the one intervention hypothesis in this folder authored by a Nobel laureate, which is the use the genre makes of it, and because the distance between Crick’s careful framing and that use is the point.
Connections
Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Silurian Hypothesis · Galileo Project · Avi Loeb · Annihilation · Project Hail Mary