Physicist Claudius Gros from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, is essaying about landing an automated gene laboratory on celestial bodies outside our solar system for life to evolve.
The essay will soon appear in the scientific journal Astrophysics and Space Science.
Over the last few years, the search for exoplanets has shown that very different types of these planets exist.
"It is therefore certain that we will discover a large number of exoplanets which are inhabitable intermittently but not permanently. Life would indeed be possible on these planets but it would not have the time to grow and develop independently," said Gros.
He said that from a technical standpoint, the feat -- under the Genesis Project -- could already be achieved within a few decades with the aid of interstellar unmanned micro spacecraft.
With the aim of establishing an ecosphere of unicellular organisms on the target planet, an automated gene laboratory on board the spacecraft would synthesise some single-cell organisms on arrival of the celestial body.
These organisms could subsequently develop autonomously and possibly also into complex life forms.
"In this way, we could jump the approximately four billion years which had been necessary on Earth to reach the Precambrian stage of development out of which the animal world developed about 500 million years ago," Gros explained.
He noted that to avoid any danger to any life form which might be already be present, the spacecrafts would only head for uninhabited exoplanets.
