The Constructors: The Improbability of Spontaneous Life

On faith, its history written in blood, the mathematical impossibility of a universe that built itself by accident, and the extraterrestrial architects that nobody in respectable science is allowed to discuss

There are people who know me exclusively from the outside. From the hard shell. From the forensic expert who dissects without sentiment, who says what he thinks, and who learned in thirty years of work in courtrooms and investigation rooms that discomfort is not an argument against truth. These people, reading this text, will be surprised, perhaps even shaken, because what follows is the most personal thing I have ever written publicly, after decades in which it sat inside me, densified, took a form that I had to name for myself first before I could name it for others.

The few who made it through the shell and met the person underneath will recognize every sentence. The physicians among them, the scientists, some of my closest friends, are smiling right now, because they know: that’s exactly how he is. That’s exactly what he said, over dinner, late at night, when the conversation finally arrived somewhere worth going. I am someone who tells the truth even when it hurts. Not out of sadism, but because lying through silence or polished phrasing is a form of cowardice I am not capable of.

This article will attract criticism. Very probably some people will stop reading after the third paragraph. Others will accuse me of unseriousness, naivety, or that particularly popular category of reproach that says: you cannot hold this position as a scientist. I can hold it. I do hold it. And I explain here why.

What a Two-Year-Old Experienced and Never Forgot

My parents were poor. Not poor in the romantic sense of living simply, but poor in a way that means concrete deprivation, that leaves marks, that cannot be prettified through nostalgia. Bread soup was a highlight. Meat on the table was a rarity, not a given. We lived in a social housing apartment, two rooms, and outings were rare, which is why the one summer day at a Munich public swimming pool with my mother and Aunt Linde stayed in my memory all the more completely, surely also because it was the day on which I died.

I was two years old when I drowned in a Munich public swimming pool. My mother told me later that I could not remember any of it, that this was medically impossible, that a child of that age could not retain such a thing. She was wrong. I remember everything. I remember my mother’s black bathing suit with large white polka dots. I remember Aunt Linde, as we called her, in her purple bathing suit with green and yellow accents. I remember images so precise that they cannot be reconstruction, because reconstruction does not invent colors that no one ever described to me afterward.

What I do not know is the exact sequence of what happened. How I got into the water, who pulled me out, how long I was beneath the surface, none of that was ever told to me, presumably out of that mixture of shame and speechlessness that marked that generation as a whole when it came to things that did not fit into everyday life. What I do know is the during. And the during was light. A warmth that did not resemble the warmth of a summer sun above an outdoor pool, but a warmth that arises from within and radiates outward, a kind of being-held that a child in a drowning body could not have fabricated.

It was beautiful.

That is the word that to this day most precisely describes what I experienced then. Beautiful. Not frightening, not full of awe, not religiously charged, but quiet and beautiful and familiar in a way that a child of that age, with the means of his language and his categories, could not have fabricated. I was at a place that knew me. I was someone who was known. And the only thing that could compete with the intensity of the experiencing was the knowledge that this being would not end, because it had been before me and would continue after me, and that what lay between the passes was not the essential thing, but the pause between the phrases of a longer composition.

And then I came back.

What I experienced upon waking was the exact opposite of what during had been there. It was fear. But the word fear does not capture it, because the word fear belongs to the vocabulary of ordinary experience, and what I experienced did not belong to that vocabulary. It was a fear that exceeded human scale, a fear that had neither an object nor a beginning, but was simply present in me like a second body trying to break out of the first. I cannot describe it today, six decades later, because the language with which I am attempting it is the language that handles ordinary fears, and that was not an ordinary fear.

I believe that it was the impact. The impact of that expanded consciousness upon the narrow, living, breathing body that had just escaped death. The body had survived. Something in me knew that it would actually have been somewhere else. The return was not a gift but a being-shoved-back into a tighter form.

I am asking that you genuinely pause there. Not for drama, not to generate sympathy, but because that experience raised for me the deepest question I have ever had confronted with any phenomenon. What is it that experiences, in a child who cannot yet read, to whom no philosophy had been taught, who had no vocabulary for reincarnation or continuity of consciousness or transmigration of souls, because none of these concepts had ever been mentioned in his presence? What encounters something it has never seen before, and recognizes it nonetheless as familiar?

The experience was complete. It had a logic. It implied the assumption that consciousness does not end with the ending of this body, that the continuity of experience persists through a new form, and that what we call death is a different sort of relocation than the one we usually settle for. That is not an experience one invents. It is an experience one has because it is there.

I say this not as a religious statement. I say it as an empirical observation, as a data point that fits into none of the available explanatory schemas, and for that very reason should not be looked away from. The skeptics will object that near-death experiences are neurobiologically explainable, oxygen deprivation in the dying brain, endogenous release of dimethyltryptamine, residual current in the temporal lobes. That may apply in many cases. What it does not explain is why reports of near-death experiences from completely different cultures, age groups, and religious backgrounds are so consistently structured that they form their own phenomenological class. What it likewise does not explain is why a two-year-old child, who according to every established theory of developmental psychology should not be able to form autobiographical memories of this depth of detail, today recalls with full clarity colors and patterns that no one ever described to him afterward. The black bathing suit with white polka dots. Aunt Linde’s purple bathing suit with the green and yellow accents. The memory was not reconstructed from later accounts, because my mother explicitly said I could not know this. It emerged from the experiencing itself, and it stayed.

I believe in reincarnation. I believe in the transmission of energy, in the continuity of something essential through changing forms. And I believe this not from religious feeling, not from comfort or wishful thinking, but from the connection of three observations that for me cannot be separated: first, the conservational principle that physics formulated long ago without fully drawing its consequences, namely that energy is not destroyed but transforms; second, that experience in the water, which showed me, long before I had categories for such things, that what we call consciousness is not bound to the body the way water is bound to its pitcher; and third, that incomprehensible fear upon waking, which becomes meaningful only if one assumes that something within me had registered the difference between the two states.

Why should the phenomenon of subjective experience be exempt from the conservation principle that applies to everything else in the universe? The materialists have no answer to that which is not circular. They say that consciousness is a function of the brain, because the brain is demonstrably responsible for its modulation, and when the brain stops, consciousness must stop too, because consciousness is a function of the brain. That is not a conclusion. That is a premise that declares itself to be the conclusion.

I Am Not a Simple Person, and I Never Was

I have spent my entire life trying to be self-sufficient. Not in the libertarian sense of refusing society, but in the deeper sense of wanting to know. Really know. I can swap the engine of a car, the clutch and brakes are no problem. When medical questions concern me, I sit down and read until I have understood the underlying mechanisms, not the short version, not the patient summary, but the biochemistry. When I do visit a physician, I know in most cases what he will say before he says it, and if he doesn’t say it, I say it for him. The physicians who know me more closely and are reading this text right now are smiling, because that is literally true.

This attitude, this needing-to-know, was never an intellectual pose for me, but a kind of fundamental need that showed itself early. I had to understand how things function. How people function. How life functions. How the world functions. And eventually, on the long path through biochemistry, neurology, anthropology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, I arrived at a result that shook me, because it was not logically explicable for me. And everything that is not logically explicable using the tools of this world, that cannot be explained from the known laws and structures of this planet, is for me the strongest available indication that its origin lies elsewhere.

God. Really. Where Does the Logic Come In?

I say this without levity, and I say it without wanting to provoke anyone: I do not believe in God. In any. Not in the God of the Bible, not in the God of the Quran, not in the God of the Torah, not in any of the many gods that human groups have invented, cultivated, and deployed for their respective purposes over the course of their history.

The reason for that is not arrogance. The reason is logic.

If a being is supposed to exist that is omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, and simultaneously the creator of this world, then this being must either have wanted the world exactly as it is, or it cannot do anything about it. Both are unsatisfying. If God wanted this world as it is, then he wanted infant death, he wanted cancer, he wanted Alzheimer’s, he wanted the atomic bomb, he wanted Auschwitz. If he can do nothing about it, he is not omnipotent. That is not a new argument, that is the problem of theodicy, which has occupied philosophers for two thousand years and to which no theology has ever given a convincing answer, only new formulations of the problem disguised as answers.

I read the Bible. I have read it carefully, more carefully than many who hold it daily in their hands. What I find in it is not coherent divine will, but human inconsistency, compiled in a document edited over centuries by many authors with different agendas, different audience expectations, and different political pressures. A God who in Leviticus orders the genocide of entire peoples, and in the Sermon on the Mount proclaims love of enemies as the highest commandment, reveals no consistent divine plan. He reveals the incoherence of the people writing in his name. That is not godlessness, that is literary criticism. And every honest theologian, speaking in a private moment, knows it.

What Faith Has Actually Accomplished

I could travel through denominations and religions here for hours, and everywhere I would encounter the same pattern. But I stay with Christianity, because it is the system that has most strongly shaped Western history and is most relevant in our context.

The Crusades, over roughly two centuries, killed hundreds of thousands in the name of a God whose center, according to the testimony of his own scriptures, was love of neighbor. The Inquisition tortured and executed people for the offense of thinking differently, some of them in the absence of other charges for offenses that even the Bible itself does not classify as capital crimes. The witch trials that swept through Europe between 1400 and 1700 burned between forty thousand and sixty thousand people by conservative estimates, the overwhelming majority of them women, many of them bearers of empirical medical knowledge that church authority had reclassified as a pact with the devil (Levack, B. P., 2013, The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, Oxford University Press). Walburga Hausmannin, a midwife from Dillingen, was executed in 1587 partly because she used herbs to relieve pain during childbirth. Pain during childbirth was considered God-given. Anyone who alleviated it was interfering with God’s plan.

And then, the strongest image of all: the Crusaders. Men who had fought, bled, and died for decades on papal commission, who held Jerusalem, who fulfilled the holy mandate. The Knights Templar, the most organized fighting force in Christian Europe, were arrested in 1307 at the behest of King Philip IV of France, tortured, compelled into confessions that had no evidentiary value because they were produced under torture, and burned at the stake. The Pope, the representative of that God in whose name the Templars had died for years, did nothing effective. He signed. An institution that destroys its most devoted servants for political and financial motives carries no moral authority. It carries power, and that is a different word.

Every other major religion has its version of this story. Islam has jihad and inquisition. Hinduism has caste violence. Buddhism has ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Every belief system that comes into contact with political power shows the same structure: the religious justification of violence against those who believe differently, the co-optation of the sacred for the interests of the powerful, the instrumentalization of transcendence for very earthly purposes. That is not coincidence. It is the predictable consequence of a system that is exempt from verifiable accountability requirements, because it derives its authority from a source that by definition may not be questioned.

I say this not out of bitterness. I say it because it is historical fact, and because an intellectually honest engagement with the question of whether God exists cannot avoid asking why the institutions that were supposed to embody his will on Earth have so systematically violated the central commandments of their own scriptures.

But: Reincarnation and the Energy That Remains

I say I do not believe in God, and simultaneously I say that I believe in reincarnation and in energy transmission. That sounds like a contradiction. It is not.

God, in the sense in which he is conceived in the monotheistic religions, is a personal being with intentions, plans, wrath and grace, a being that hears prayers, that steers fates, that intervenes in history. This conception contradicts the evidence so fundamentally that I cannot maintain it.

The idea that conscious experience ceases with the death of the body and extinguishes completely contradicts the evidence in a different way. Energy is conserved. That is not esoteric, that is the first law of thermodynamics. What changes are the forms. What ceases when an organism dies is the specific biological organization of that energy. What happens with experiencing consciousness, nobody knows, truly nobody, and whoever claims to know it is lying in both directions.

What I thought as a child at the window was not wishful thinking. It was a conclusion. It was there before I had any framework into which I could have placed it. That is relevant evidence for me, not conclusive, but more relevant than the silence that materialist science gives to this question.

The Common Ancestor and the Problem of Time

In July 2024, a study by Edmund Moody and colleagues at the University of Bristol appeared in Nature Ecology and Evolution that shook the scientific community in a way that has not yet fully penetrated public reporting (Moody, E. R. R., et al., 2024, The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system, Nature Ecology and Evolution, 8, 1654-1666). The study examined the last common ancestor of all living organisms on Earth, known by the acronym LUCA, Last Universal Common Ancestor, and delivered results whose consequences have not yet been sufficiently discussed.

LUCA lived approximately 4.2 billion years ago. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. That means that complete, complex life forms appeared on a planet that had only just cooled and that was during this early phase subjected to intense asteroid bombardment, in fewer than 300 million years. That sounds like a long time. In geological scales, it is a frightening speed.

What this LUCA was is even more important. The Moody team reconstructed a genome with at least 2.5 megabases encoding approximately 2,600 proteins, a complexity comparable to that of modern bacteria. LUCA had a functional immune system, a CRISPR-like system for defending against viruses that presupposes considerable molecular sophistication of its own. LUCA was no primitive primordial soup, no simple self-replicating strand, no intermediate stage on the way to complexity. LUCA was already fully complex, with everything that entails.

And now I raise the question that the study poses without answering. How does an organism with 2,600 proteins and an immune system come into existence in 300 million years, on a planet under active asteroid bombardment, without stable oceanic chemistry, without the milieu that many abiogenesis hypotheses assume as a prerequisite? And why does it appear complete, complex, fully equipped, without recognizable precursors?

The standard biological answer is that we don’t find these precursors because they left no fossils, and that the time was sufficient for gradual development. That is logically not refutable. But it is also not provable. It is an assumption postulated from within the framework of evolutionary theory, not an observation. The observation is: the earliest living entity we can reconstruct from genetic sequences was already enormously complex.

The Number Nobody Wants to Hear

Fred Hoyle was an astrophysicist at Oxford University, a declared atheist, and one of the most mathematically rigorous thinkers of the twentieth century. He had no religious agenda. He had a calculation. In his 1982 works, written jointly with astrophysicist N. C. Wickramasinghe, Hoyle calculated the probability that the approximately two thousand enzymes required for the simplest self-sustaining cellular life could arise through random chemical processes (Hoyle, F., and Wickramasinghe, N. C., 1982, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism, Simon and Schuster). The result was a number: one in ten to the power of forty thousand.

To put that in context: mathematicians set one in ten to the power of fifty as the threshold below which an event is considered statistically impossible within the physical limits of the known universe. The total number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated at approximately ten to the power of eighty. The age of the universe in seconds is approximately ten to the power of seventeen. Neither number comes anywhere close to the combinatorial impossibility that Hoyle had calculated.

Hoyle, the atheist, arrived at a conclusion he himself described as uncomfortable. He wrote: if one proceeds directly and without deflection by fear of the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their extraordinary measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No creationism, no God, no religion. An atheist with a calculation, following its consequence.

Harold Morowitz at Yale University performed a complementary calculation that delivered even more drastic results. He calculated that if one were to heat a large quantity of bacteria until every chemical bond was broken, and then allow the atoms to cool and form new bonds in equilibrium, the probability that a living bacterium would be present at the end would be approximately one in ten to the power of one hundred billion (Morowitz, H. J., 1968, Energy Flow in Biology, Academic Press). One in ten to the power of one hundred billion. That is not a scientific discussion. That is a mathematical termination of possibility.

Murray Eden at MIT calculated the probability of producing functional polypeptide sequences through random processes at one in ten to the power of three hundred and thirteen. These calculations come from different scientists, from different methodological approaches, and they converge on a common conclusion: the spontaneous origin of even the simplest biological life is, mathematically speaking, not a theory supported by the numbers. It is a theory maintained because the alternatives are institutionally more uncomfortable.

The Harvard biochemist and Nobel laureate George Wald formulated this with an openness rarely encountered in academic circles: one need only contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are, as a result. That statement is not an argument. It is a creed, packaged in scientific language.

Francis Crick and the Confession of the Century

There is a fact in the history of science that is absent from the textbooks and absent from the talk shows in which evolution and creation are debated. Francis Crick, that Crick who together with James Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA, one of the cofounders of modern molecular biology, published in 1973 together with chemist Leslie Orgel in the journal Icarus an article titled Directed Panspermia (Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E., 1973, Directed Panspermia, Icarus, 19(3), 341-346).

In this article, Crick and Orgel argued that life on Earth may have been deliberately seeded by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Not through meteorite impact, not through random cosmic transport, but intentionally, through a technologically advanced intelligence that had developed space vehicles and brought microorganisms to Earth to establish life here. Crick did not formulate this thesis as certainty, but as a seriously pursuable hypothesis: it is possible that life reached the Earth in this way.

Crick was no mystic. He was no esotericist. He was one of the most precise scientific thinkers of the twentieth century, decorated with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. And he found himself driven to this thesis by two findings: first by the universality of the genetic code, and second by the presence of molybdenum. Molybdenum is an exceedingly rare element on Earth, present in the surface at a concentration of only about 0.02 percent, yet it plays a disproportionate role in the biochemistry of all known life forms. If life had originated on Earth, one would expect it to preferentially utilize the abundant elements. That it is instead built on a rare element that might be abundant on another planet was for Crick and Orgel a possible indication of an extraterrestrial origin.

In 1981, Crick dedicated an independent book to the subject, titled Life Itself. He developed there the argument that the probability of an Earth-based origin of life is so low that an external source, meaning an intelligent influence from outside Earth, must be seriously considered scientifically. The codiscoverer of the DNA structure was saying essentially what I am saying in this article. And it was ignored, because it fits into none of the available institutional drawers.

The Mystery of the Universal Language

There is in all of biology barely a fact so remarkable as the universality of the genetic code, and barely one more rarely discussed in its full significance. The genetic code is the rule by which nucleotide triplets, meaning sequences of three of the four DNA bases adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, are translated into amino acids that are then assembled into proteins. There are 64 possible triplets and 20 amino acids, which means the code offers considerable latitude: multiple triplets can encode the same amino acid, and many other assignment systems would work just as well.

And yet: all known living organisms on Earth, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals including humans, use with minimal and well-documented exceptions the same genetic code. A triplet that encodes the amino acid methionine in a human ribosome encodes the same amino acid in a bacterium living in the deep sea, in a fungus decomposing a rotten tree stump, in an octopus, in a roundworm, in an elephant.

That is not a necessity. It is a choice. Different codes would work equally well, and if life on Earth had developed multiple times independently, one would expect different lineages to use different codes, just as different human cultures developed different writing systems to fulfill the same function. The universality of the genetic code is the strongest available evidence that all life on Earth traces back to a single common origin, a single founding moment in which the code was established and then, through the entire history of evolution, conserved unchanged (Koonin, E. V., and Novozhilov, A. S., 2009, Origin and evolution of the genetic code: The universal enigma, IUBMB Life, 61(2), 99-111).

One language for everything. One blueprint that no subsequent biological system departs from, because it is anchored in the architecture.

What the Ancients Chiseled Into Stone

I am someone who has spent his life analyzing images, interpreting video footage, reading traces, and drawing conclusions that must hold up in court. When someone tells me that an image must be interpreted one way and not another because that is the consensus, I ask about the method, the procedure, the alternative hypotheses, and I ask to be shown why the consensus interpretation excludes the others rather than merely displacing them.

With that eye I look at the sarcophagus lid of the Maya ruler K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, discovered in 1952 beneath the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, Mexico, dated to the seventh century of the common era. The image shows a human figure in a forward-leaning, semi-reclined position. The figure has its hands in a position that creates the impression of manipulating controls. Below the figure are flame-like patterns. Around the figure run curved, tubular structures. The upper body of the figure is surrounded by an enclosed environment that resembles the boundaries of a unit separated from the outside world.

Mainstream archaeology interprets this image as a depiction of Pakal’s death and his journey into the Maya underworld Xibalba, in the context of Maya cosmology and World Tree symbolism. That is a coherent interpretation, embedded in the cultural framework of Maya imagery. I do not contest it. I note that two coherent interpretations of the same image can coexist, and that the institutional preference for one interpretation does not cause the other to disappear.

What the sculptor chiseled into the sarcophagus lid, he must somehow have perceived or received as transmitted knowledge. If it was a spiritual abstraction, why does the image in its overall composition so strikingly resemble a pilot in a cockpit, without the sculptor having ever been able to see a cockpit? How do we explain that cultures in no known connection to each other, on different continents, with different writing systems and different religious frameworks, independently produced figures in garments resembling protective suits, depicted flying objects, and described beings that came from the sky?

Egyptian tomb art contains across dynasties and sites depictions that the majority of scholarship classifies as mythological, but that a significant minority of researchers interprets as records of something the artists observed or received as transmitted accounts. The Dendera reliefs, which some read as stylized depictions of mythological deities and others as technical illustrations of illuminating devices, have to this day received no conclusive interpretation that explains all the findings.

I am not saying that these images prove encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence. I am saying that a civilization capable of building the Great Pyramid of Giza, a structure whose internal dimensional tolerances are in the millimeter range and whose astronomical alignment to geographic coordinates and celestial constellations we could barely replicate with modern machinery, was no civilization of primitives to be treated with condescension. Something made them capable of what they were capable of. Something that has not yet found sufficient explanation in our models of human development.

And every archaeologist who has spent enough decades on excavation sites, who is honest with himself when no one is listening, has had that moment in which he stood before a finding and thought: this cannot actually be. And then he set it aside, because the institutional consequences of not setting it aside were too heavy.

The Universe Was Not Built for Us, and That Is the Point

Now the simplest argument. The one about which I need to spend the fewest words, because it speaks for itself.

The observable universe contains, according to current estimates, two trillion galaxies. Each galaxy contains on average one hundred billion stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, with its approximately two hundred billion stars, is entirely unremarkable in its size and complexity, an average specimen of the most common galaxy class. The total number of stars in the observable universe is estimated at approximately ten to the power of twenty-four, a number for which the human brain has no intuitive equivalent.

And around a significant fraction of these stars orbit planets. The Kepler space telescope and its successors have shown that planets are not the exception but the rule. For the Milky Way alone, several hundred billion planets are estimated, a substantial fraction of which lie in the habitable zone of their stars. The Drake equation, formulated in 1961 by radio astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the number of technological civilizations that might currently be active in the Milky Way, and delivers depending on parameter choices results between one and several thousand (Drake, F. D., 1961, Project Ozma, Physics Today, 14(4), 40-46).

Anyone who in this context believes that Homo sapiens on the third planet of an unremarkable star in an unremarkable galaxy is the only intelligent life form that has ever existed in this structure is making no modest statement. He is making the most anthropocentric statement possible in this universe. He is saying: all of that, two trillion galaxies, ten to the power of twenty-four stars, fifteen billion years of cosmic history, was produced so that we could sit here and use smartphones. That is not science. It is the exact opposite of modesty.

What I believe instead is that the universe contains intelligence we have not documented, that some of that intelligence is older than our species by timescales that dwarf the entirety of human history, and that the origin of biological complexity on Earth, given what the probability calculations say about spontaneous generation, is considerably more consistent with what I call directed seeding than with a chemical accident in a primordial ocean.

The Constructors

For what I consider the most plausible explanation of the available evidence, I have chosen a name: the Constructors. Not gods. Not in any religious sense. No beings that want to be worshipped, that hear prayers, that steer fates. Technologically advanced, biological entities, old on timescales against which the existence of Homo sapiens is a footnote, who had developed the capacity to design biological life, transport it, and establish it at a prepared location.

I once put this conviction into a publication, a manuscript I never released, because the criticism arrived before the manuscript was public. That kind of institutional preemptive rejection that meets anyone who poses the problem seriously and without a prefabricated answer. I stepped back from releasing it, not because the arguments had grown weaker, but because I recognized that certain debates need their time.

The time is now.

The DNA molecule is, biochemically speaking, not the product of a gradual developmental process from simpler precursors through natural selection. That is not due to a conceptual failing of evolutionary theory, which for what it describes, namely the change and diversification of life on the basis of existing life, is excellently supported. The problem lies before evolution: in the first step, in the emergence of the self-replicating system itself.

Selection requires replication. Replication requires an information system. The simplest known information system that enables replication is already substantial in its basic complexity. The nucleotide bases of DNA do not pair randomly, and they do not pair for physicochemical reasons inherent in their own molecular structure. The pairing adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine is a property of the complete system, not of the individual components. A self-replicating system that is supposed to emerge from such a code must have this code completely before it can replicate. There is no intermediate state in which a half-finished genetic code replicates and is selected, because a half-finished genetic code does not replicate.

The Constructors, as my working hypothesis holds, did not create this system from nothing. They developed it somewhere else in a different biochemical context, over timescales and with technological means we do not know, and brought it to the early Earth at a point that aligns with what LUCA research describes: approximately 4.2 billion years ago, within 300 million years of the formation of a habitable planet, as a complete, complex, functional life system, immune system included.

Evolution did everything else afterward. The diversification of life, the emergence of eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, plants, animals, humans, all of that is evolutionary biology, and I do not doubt it. What I doubt is that the starting point, the first 2,600 proteins, the complete replication system, the universal genetic code, appeared in 300 million years on a planet under asteroid bombardment from chemical accident.

The Single Cell That Shows Everything

There is an image made available in 2024 through super-resolution microscopy, a three-dimensional visualization of a single human cell at nanoscale resolution, and anyone who looks at it without stopping is not looking carefully enough (Andronov, L., et al., 2024, Nanoscale subcellular architecture revealed by multicolor three-dimensional super-resolution imaging, Nature Communications, 15, 4174). What that image shows is no simple bag of chemicals. What it shows is a city, in the fullest sense of that word, with specialized districts, with transportation infrastructure running between them, with communication systems, with energy production, with waste processing, with quality control, with repair mechanisms, with archival systems storing information in a format of extraordinary compactness and precision, all coordinated, all functioning simultaneously.

The DNA in a single human cell, if unspooled, would stretch approximately two meters. Every cell in the human body contains the same two meters of tightly coiled information, and the human body contains approximately thirty-seven trillion cells. The information in that DNA encodes not only the proteins required to build and maintain the body, but the regulatory systems governing when and where each protein is expressed, the timing mechanisms coordinating development, the error-correction systems catching and repairing copying mistakes, and the mechanisms by which the entire system replicates itself with extraordinary fidelity.

That is not the product of a tornado passing through a junkyard, to use Hoyle’s own analogy. That is an engineering achievement of a sophistication we cannot currently replicate, that we are only beginning to understand, and whose origin, if we take the probability calculations seriously, cannot be explained by the randomness of chemistry alone.

Homo sapiens: The Most Brilliant and the Most Self-Destructive Creature This Planet Has Ever Produced

The result of this process, Homo sapiens, is the most remarkable and the most catastrophically self-destructive thing this planet has produced. Both simultaneously, and I mean both with the same seriousness.

We can decode the genome. We have set foot on the moon. We have built machines that perform calculations in seconds for which a human brain would need millions of years. We have defeated diseases, reduced famines, doubled average life expectancy in two centuries. The quantity of accumulated knowledge that humanity possesses today exceeds any comparison with any earlier point.

And with all that knowledge we fight wars over lines drawn on maps. We destroy ecosystems that we need for our own survival. We repeat the same fundamental errors, generation after generation, with a consistency that would be frightening if it were not so familiar. Homo sapiens is, in terms of his cognitive capacities, the result of a construction of extraordinary sophistication. In terms of his collective behavioral steering, he is an unfinished experiment.

I do not believe we will stop making these errors. I believe the pattern sits too deep to be corrected by the accumulation of knowledge alone. Knowledge we have. What we lack is the wisdom to use it, and wisdom is not downloadable, not transmissible by curriculum, not genetically stably heritable. Every generation must work it out afresh, and most fail.

That is not pessimism. It is a finding. Whoever is mistaken about a finding cannot treat the underlying problem.

The Question No Believer Asks

I close with the question I always ask when people tell me that the existence of God is proven by the existence of life, by the beauty of the world, by the complexity of creation. If God created this complexity, who created God?

The question is usually dismissed with the argument that God is by definition eternal, that he has no beginning, that he is the first cause that itself requires no cause. That is a philosophical maneuver, not an argument. It simply stipulates that the explanatory chain ends at a particular point, without explaining why it ends there. If one applies the same logical operation to the matter of the universe, the result is identical: the universe exists, has no external origin, and the question of what came before is meaningless. Nothing has been gained.

What I find more convincing about the Constructors than about God is not that the Constructors solve the puzzle. They do not. They displace it, just as God displaces it. But they displace it in a way that is compatible with the natural scientific worldview, with the emergence of technology through evolution over very long timescales, with the distribution of life through the universe, with the possibility that intelligent life forms in a universe of this age and size reach the level of technological capability that we ourselves might reach in some thousands of years. They are not supernatural. They are natural, simply older, more advanced, and beyond our current capacity to detect.

That is not a creed. That is a working hypothesis that does the most justice to the evidence I have gathered. It is falsifiable, it is extensible, it consecrates nothing. And it is, unlike the belief in a personal God who steers history, hears prayers, and judges sins, at least not refutable by the mere contemplation of the world as it is.

The Constructors may have created something brilliant. Whether they would be satisfied with what became of it, I do not know. But I know that the responsibility for what we make of it rests entirely with us. No God relieves us of it. No cosmic plan justifies it retroactively. We are the result of a design that gave us the capacity for understanding.

What we understand and what we do with it, that is our task. And measured by that, we are, by a wide margin, still beginners.

A second, closely related article has been in the works for several days and will appear in the coming days. Its title is Probability Zero, and it provides the mathematical foundation for what is laid out here philosophically and historically. It works through, in numbers, in formulas, in comparisons that the human imagination can actually reach, why the emergence of the human genome by chance is not merely an improbable but a mathematically excluded possibility. Anyone who has been moved by this text will find in the next text the numbers that stand behind the movement.

This is the position of a scientist who has spent his life gathering evidence and following where it leads, even when that takes him to uncomfortable places. It is not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It is an honest account of where a lifetime of looking has led. Whoever wants to object, please: with arguments, with evidence, without appeal to authority or consensus. Consensus is what currently passes for majority opinion in science. Truth is something else.

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