Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself in which he argues, from a scientific point of view, that life could not have got started on this planet. … To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe … and one of those spaceships crashed into the early earth, its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us. And that’s honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, thought of (the) beginning of life on this planet.

Stanley Miller
American Chemist

Yes, Francis Crick proposes what he called directed panspermia, which is to say some alien civilization put some cells — some bacterial cells — on a rocket and crashed it on the earth.

Nick Lane
Professor of Evolutionary Biochemisry at University College, London

Both quotes from Life in a Barrel, Radiolab, around 43:10

Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and he truly believed life began, more or less, as the science experiment of an extraterrestrial entity. It’s important we don’t discount or marginalize ideas too quickly because they sound crazy today. People were killed because they believed the sun didn’t revolve around the earth.

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The same episode claims that “99.9%” of all life that’s ever existed on Earth has gone extinct. Which is to say: The possibility that we began as an alien experiment, that we began as a creation of a god, that we even exist at all — is roughly the same.

Photo: Francis Crick at a dinner at the Nobel Prize Winners Conference in Lindau, Germany, 1981