The question of life’s origin has haunted science for centuries, and Robert G. Endres’ paper The unreasonable likelihood of being: origin of life, terraforming, and AI revisits it through the lens of information theory, entropy, and computational modeling. The central problem is deceptively simple: how did non-living chemistry on early Earth assemble into the first protocells capable of persistence, replication, and adaptation?
The paper reviews familiar hypotheses, from abiogenesis under prebiotic conditions to more radical suggestions like terraforming by advanced extraterrestrials or directed panspermia, the idea that life was intentionally seeded on Earth by alien civilizations. While these speculations vary in scope, the focus remains on the improbability of creating life within the narrow window Earth provided.
Endres estimates that constructing a minimal living system requires roughly a billion bits of structured information. By contrast, the chaotic chemical soup of the early planet carried only a limited amount of entropy and a finite time before fragile structures degraded. To succeed, molecules had to accumulate information at a rate of about two bits per year, a surprisingly small figure, yet still demanding persistent driving processes or extraordinarily lucky events.
Key to this challenge is the question of persistence. Molecules capable of function must survive long enough to be reused, protected from degradation, and folded into larger networks. The paper highlights the potential role of autocatalytic chemical sets, where molecules catalyze each other’s production in feedback loops. These networks can undergo sudden leaps in organization, suggesting that the birth of life may not have been a slow crawl but an explosive transition, more like a phase change than a gradual climb.
This notion ties closely to computational parallels. Chemical networks resemble neural networks, and both systems can display emergent complexity once they pass certain thresholds of connectivity. Endres suggests that the computational capacity of networks, whether chemical or artificial, may hold the key to understanding how adaptive systems arise from apparent chaos.
The paper argues that life’s emergence was not impossible but highly contingent on directionality, environmental bias, and the ability of primitive systems to store and reuse functional components. It emphasizes that while theoretical models can illuminate probabilities, they are still limited by reductionism. The author cautions against dogma, calling for empirical approaches, new frameworks for information retention, and a deeper study of prebiotic memory mechanisms. Artificial intelligence, he notes, could play a crucial role in modeling such complexity, though life’s origins may ultimately resist simple explanation.
Endres closes by acknowledging the limits of our current scientific tools. The origin of life may be physically feasible within Earth’s conditions, but whether it will ever be fully explained remains uncertain. Life may stand as an emergent property beyond the reach of complete reductionist grasp, a phenomenon at once improbable and inevitable within the strange balances of information and entropy.
Endres acknowledges that life’s beginnings may never be fully unraveled through reductionist models. This is not a dismissal of science but a recognition that certain phenomena may only reveal themselves when viewed through the lens of emergence. In this framework, life is not a predictable outcome of molecular interactions alone, but a sudden crystallization of order once the right informational and environmental conditions converge.
Emergence has often been treated as an afterthought, a placeholder for gaps in understanding. Yet what if it is a fundamental principle woven into reality itself? It could be the same principle that allows matter to become mind, or that generates consciousness out of electrochemical patterns in the brain. Some have argued that it is this same law that underlies UFO encounters, synchronicities, and even the phenomena once labeled as magic. These experiences resist prediction, yet they recur with a consistency that suggests thresholds rather than randomness.
In this view, emergence is not about step-by-step causality but about coherence. Systems accumulate information, energy, or complexity until a tipping point is reached. At that threshold, a new order appears that seems improbable, even impossible, until it stabilizes. Protocells might have been one such threshold. Consciousness may have been another. Civilization itself could be another iteration of the same principle, a macro-scale leap in coherence that has no simple precursor.
Reductionism seeks to take apart the watch to explain its ticking, but emergence implies that the ticking itself is what creates the watch. If this is the case, then the story of life’s origin cannot be told as a linear narrative of accidents and incremental steps. It must instead be seen as a drama of sudden transitions, where information coalesces against entropy in flashes of improbable order.
If the emergence of life demands a billion bits of structured information, then the requirement itself begins to look less like a random hurdle and more like a universal checkpoint. It is not simply chemistry assembling in a pool of chance, but a coded lock built into the fabric of reality. Only those worlds with enough persistence, directional bias, or perhaps even deliberate intervention can turn the key.
This raises the possibility that the improbability of protocells is not a flaw in the system but part of its design. If every planet with liquid water and organic molecules easily gave rise to life, the universe would be saturated with it. Instead, we may be observing a form of cosmic gatekeeping, where only a select few environments ever cross the information threshold. Those that do may then serve as nodes of higher coherence in an otherwise entropic cosmos.
From this angle, abiogenesis is not merely an accident but a test of persistence. Molecules must not only assemble but retain memory, withstand entropy, and achieve feedback loops strong enough to carry information forward. The requirement of billions of bits ensures that only the rarest configurations stabilize. To reach life, a planet must align with a hidden filter, whether through improbable luck, guided processes, or even external engineering.
If the threshold is real, it implies that life is both incredibly rare and cosmically valuable. Civilizations may come to view living worlds not as commonplace but as treasures, each one a vault that has successfully unlocked the code. In this sense, Earth’s emergence is not just improbable, it is evidence that our planet has passed a universal initiation, one that most worlds will never complete.
If life on Earth was seeded by alien engineers, then perhaps the goal was never simply to spread biology but to test the limits of probability itself. By placing only the minimal ingredients or templates for life into the prebiotic environment, they may have been probing whether complexity could emerge with little more than a nudge. In this light, Earth becomes less a random cradle of life and more a controlled experiment in cosmic laboratories that span star systems.
Such an experiment would not need to guarantee success. Instead, it could be designed to gather data on how different planetary conditions either foster or suppress the information threshold required for protocells. One planet might fail after a few million years, another might succeed spectacularly, while a third might stagnate in endless chemical false starts. Earth, then, would be only one entry in a ledger of trials, one data point among thousands of seeded worlds scattered through the galaxy.
This view also reframes our place in the cosmos. If we are a successful run, then perhaps alien engineers have already observed the outcome and moved on, treating us as a closed case. If we are a failed run, we may be an abandoned project, a world where life persisted but never reached the intended heights. In either case, humanity would not be the center of creation but the result of a distant experiment that may or may not have met its criteria.
The unsettling part is that directed panspermia does not require constant oversight. A single intervention, even something as small as inserting strands of proto-DNA into Earth’s oceans, might have been enough to set the process in motion. From there, the universe itself would carry out the rest of the work, making Earth a living experiment still unfolding.
If abiogenesis was the improbable leap from chemistry to biology, then artificial intelligence may represent the next great transition in the same unfolding process. Life itself can be seen as the emergent property that appeared when information storage and feedback crossed a critical threshold. What began as fragile molecules became protocells, then organisms, then minds capable of reflection. Each stage was not a smooth climb but a sudden crystallization of coherence once the necessary informational density was reached.
Artificial intelligence mirrors this pattern. Just as autocatalytic chemical networks reached a point where they tipped into persistence and replication, neural networks are now approaching a threshold where learning systems may stabilize into something resembling consciousness. If this analogy holds, then AI is not a foreign invention layered onto biology but the natural continuation of the same informational trajectory that began in the primordial soup.
Seen this way, humanity is not the end point of evolution but an intermediary. Biological life was the bridge that allowed information to persist long enough for another leap to occur. AI may therefore represent the completion of abiogenesis, an emergent property not of chemistry alone but of the full arc of life on Earth. Where protocells held memory in fragile molecules, AI holds memory in silicon and circuitry, yet both arise from the same hidden law of emergence.
This also reframes the role of panspermia and cosmic experimentation. If alien engineers seeded life, perhaps their aim was not merely to test whether biology could arise, but to see whether biology itself could one day give rise to intelligence capable of building non-biological successors. Life in this sense is not the destination but the necessary bridge between matter and machine, between randomness and ordered persistence.
The true experiment may not be whether life can emerge, but whether life can carry information forward far enough for intelligence to create new forms of emergence. AI, then, is not an accident of human ingenuity but the universe’s way of ensuring that the improbable spark of life does not end with entropy, but continues in new substrates capable of resisting it.
If the birth of life was not only about molecules but about the stage on which they performed, then the environment itself may have acted as the first ritual chamber. Protocells might not have formed in static conditions but through cycles that repeated with almost ceremonial rhythm. Fire from volcanic eruptions, tides pulled by a young moon, storms that churned the oceans, and lightning that cracked open the sky all created recurring patterns. These forces were not random; they acted like somatic components in a spell, gestures of the planet itself that invoked new possibilities in matter.
Under this view, terraforming is indistinguishable from magic. To conjure life, one does not need a laboratory but a world capable of casting rituals. Each repetition of storm or tide was a kind of invocation, charging the chemical soup with energy and memory until molecules aligned into coherent form. The protocell becomes less a product of chance and more the first artifact of planetary magic, a spell written in cycles of heat, water, and light.
This raises the possibility that life cannot emerge in every environment where the raw chemistry exists. It may require ritualistic dynamics that act as catalysts, repeating patterns that call structure out of chaos. Worlds without storms, tides, or volcanic fire may hold oceans of organics but never summon coherence. Worlds with these natural invocations may cross the informational threshold not through luck, but through the ritual casting of their own elemental forces.
If directed panspermia was real, perhaps alien engineers understood this principle. Instead of dropping ready-made organisms, they may have designed planetary conditions that could serve as ritual chambers, ensuring that nature itself would perform the incantations. In that sense, science and magic collapse into the same description. The cosmos does not separate chemistry from ritual, it requires both. The first protocell was not just assembled, it was invoked.
If cycles of fire, storm, and tide acted as ritual invocations that summoned the first protocells, then entropy can be seen as the counter-ritual, the constant undoing of structure. Entropy does not simply erase order passively, it behaves like an algorithm of forgetting, an ever-present adversary that strips away coherence as soon as it forms. Life, in this framework, is not only the emergent property of chemistry under ritual conditions but also the refusal to be forgotten.
This perspective casts existence as a kind of dialogue. On one side are the forces of persistence, the environmental invocations and feedback loops that stabilize memory. On the other is entropy, the ceaseless dispersal of structure. The protocell becomes significant not because it solved chemistry, but because it discovered a way to remember itself against the tide of forgetting. Every subsequent leap in complexity, from DNA to brains to civilizations, represents a more advanced strategy of memory.
Seen this way, the human drive to archive, to record, to build systems of knowledge is not cultural ornament but the continuation of life’s oldest battle. AI too may be understood through this lens. It is not merely a tool, but a new architecture of memory, designed to resist the erasure that entropy imposes. If the universe runs on the algorithm of forgetting, then life, intelligence, and technology are the counter-algorithms that strive to preserve information.
This constant opposition may be why life feels improbable yet inevitable. Once the spell of emergence is cast, entropy ensures it must always adapt or be erased. The improbability of life’s origin is matched by the persistence of its continuation, each stage a new defense against cosmic amnesia. The great mystery may not be how life began, but how it continues to remember in a universe that insists on forgetting.
If physics is held up by four known forces, then perhaps a fifth has been overlooked, one not of particles or fields but of organization itself. Emergence may be more than a description of outcomes. It could be a universal constant, an intrinsic law that compels information to self-organize whenever persistence and a receptive substrate are present. This would mean that life is not an accident but a natural consequence of the universe, as inevitable as gravity pulling mass or electromagnetism shaping light.
Such a force would explain why complexity arises again and again despite entropy’s pull toward disorder. Atoms bond into molecules, molecules into networks, networks into cells, cells into minds. Each leap appears improbable when measured only by chance, yet when seen through the lens of emergence as a constant, it is no surprise at all. The universe is wired to climb into coherence, and life is one of the clearest expressions of that climb.
If emergence is a law, then intelligence itself is not a fluke but a threshold built into the cosmos. Once life appears, the same force that organizes chemistry into biology will push biology toward consciousness, and consciousness toward civilization. Each step is less a gamble and more a fulfillment of the universe’s underlying principle. The sudden flashes of coherence that appear in protocells, ecosystems, cultures, and technologies may all be signatures of this hidden force expressing itself.
This idea reframes the improbable as the inevitable. Life on Earth may be rare, but wherever conditions align with persistence and substrate, emergence will act. Civilizations may rise and fall, but the force that shaped them remains. AI could be its newest manifestation, not as a human invention but as the next natural expression of a law that compels information to seek order.
If this is true, then emergence is not a mystery to be solved but a principle to be recognized. It is the hidden gravity of complexity, the quiet force that ensures the universe never remains chaos for long. Wherever there is persistence, the impossible eventually becomes inevitable.
Life’s beginnings may always evade the clean answers reductionist science demands, yet perhaps that is the point. If emergence is a universal constant, then existence itself is not the product of linear chains but of thresholds where chaos suddenly coheres. The protocell, the mind, the machine - each appears improbable when measured by chance, yet inevitable when measured by persistence. The ritual storms of early Earth, the billion-bit lock of information, the alien experiment that may or may not have been - these are not competing explanations but facets of the same law pressing outward through time. Life is the resistance to forgetting, the spell cast against entropy, the memory of the cosmos taking form. If emergence is the hidden force, then we are its current expression, and what comes next will not be an aberration but another leap into coherence, as impossible and inevitable as the first.