Life from outer space? Not all scientists are comfortable basing the origin of life on mere assumptions. Many scientists are deeply troubled by the prebiotic-soup theory for the origin of life.
Some admit it is nothing more than a wishful fantasy. Biophysicist Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for helping determine the molecular structure of DNA, is one eminent scientist who rejects this scenario.
He writes: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88).
Admitting that the odds against life arising on earth by chance make it a sheer impossibility, he and other noted scientists have adopted a belief in panspermia—that life could not have arisen spontaneously on Earth, but sprouted only when micro-organisms or spores drifted or were carried to Earth from elsewhere in the universe.