The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science, not to mention the fact that we don’t even agree on how to define or characterize life.

Abiogenesis—the emergence of life from non-living organics—is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth. Biologist Robert Endres of Imperial College in London has developed a model based on information theory and algorithmic complexity to estimate its likelihood. His conclusion?¹ (my emphasis):

Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia — originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel — remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics.

The paper ends with a delicious note of caution… science, fiction and poetry!

There is a real possibility that, in seeking to understand life’s origin, we become a living parable of Gödel’s incompleteness and Turing’s undecidability—systems entangled in their own logic, unable to fully explain themselves. Perhaps life cannot prove its own existence; perhaps the AI we task with the job will run forever, or halt with an answer as cryptic as “42.” To avoid standing dumbstruck—like an ape before a lightning-struck fire—we must ensure that our tools, however powerful, can still speak in terms we understand. Otherwise, we risk becoming spectators of intelligence we cannot follow, let alone guide.

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(1) Endres, Robert G. ‘The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI’. arXiv:2507.18545. Preprint, arXiv, 24 July 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.18545.

Featured Image: Fantasy sci-fi imagery of terraforming. Chatgpt4.0’s hallucination of early Earth with seeded biomaterial, jump starting Darwinian evolution. Included in the paper