So you're an alien seeding primordial Earth with life. Like any creator, you sign your work. Now we may have found that signature – in the genetic code

Vijay Marrha/Eyeem/Getty

MAXIM MAKUKOV has an idea. It’s unorthodox; you might call it “out there”. Makukov understands that. He knew he’d have his critics the moment he began to develop it. But it’s there in the numbers, he says. And numbers don’t lie.

A cosmologist and astrobiologist at the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Makukov says the numbers reveal that all terrestrial life came from outer space. Not only that, it was planted on Earth by intelligent aliens. Billions of years ago, the planet was barren and lifeless. But then, at some distant and unknowable moment, it was seeded with what Makukov calls an “intelligent-like signal” – a signal that is too orderly and intricate to have occurred randomly.

This signal, he says, is in our genetic code. Highly preserved across cosmological timescales, it has been waiting there, like an encrypted message, for anyone qualified to read it. All of the teeming varieties of life on Earth – from kangaroos and daffodils to albatrosses and us – carry it within them. And now Makukov, along with his mentor, mathematician Vladmir shCherbak of the al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, claims to have cracked it. If they are right, the answer to life, the universe and everything is… 37.

“Most biologists will agree there is a contribution to the origin of life on Earth from cosmic sources”

The idea that terrestrial life has extraterrestrial origins has a long and sometimes distinguished history. The standard version goes something like this: a primitive alien life form, perhaps a bacterium, somehow hitches a ride through space aboard an object like a meteoroid, collides with our …