Deus ex Machina
The extraterrestrial or panspermia theory suggest that life existed somewhere else out in space and was transported by meteorites, asteroids, or comets to a receptive Earth.
My view, when we as a species are buggered on this planet due to our own stupidity, we won’t be in a position to commute to viable planets outside of the solar system. We can hardly get a person to the moon after all.
The closest extrasolar planet that might support life is Proxima Centauri b, located 4.22 light years away. That’s 3.992 × 10^13 km.
However we can send unmanned probes out forever. For example, Voyager 1 has reached a distance of 23.381 billion km and may well go forever. It’s already travelled about 0.05% of the distance to Proxima Centauri b and until recently was sending data back to earth.
Therefore just as we say farewell to ourselves we’ll send out a probe to one of these planets with the basic building blocks of life, say single cell thingys, in the hope that in a couple of billion years humans, or something like them, can re-emerge on that planet.
I like to think it’s a repeat thing. Its how we got started and it will happen again and again, until there aren’t any planets to send probes to.
I love theories like this, e.g the big bang theory, that sidestep the question of “where did it all start?” by setting up a cycle of stupidity.
We are in fact the god in the machine.
offshore westerly 