Crick’s hypothesis on the origin of life (from Steyn’s column): “If so, a higher civilization, similar to ours, might have developed from it at about the time that the Earth was formed... Would they have had the urge and the technology to spread life through the wastes of space and seed these sterile planets, including our own?”
That in fact is just an appeal to “intelligent design” (deliberate lower case), a point I have no end of fun pointing out whenever the intelligentsia begins to disparage Intelligent Design as yahoo superstition.
Crick was smart enough to realize a major leap of faith was required for one to assume blind chance could lead to DNA-based life over a span as limited as geological time; apparently he was unbothered by the intellectual leap implicit in assuming that his extraterrestrial sources of genetic material somehow had to come into being as well.
It is an appeal to panspermia, or more specifically in the case of Crick, directed panspermia. Panspermia like evolution has no purpose in explaining the origins of life, just how life or organic chemical precursors to life are "spread throughout".
Wiki has a page on both panspermia and directed panspermia.
Its a very old theory but in modern times it is attributed to Fred Hoyle.
The astrobiologists study this and that is a reason that NASA sends out craft to chase the comets or the EU actually landed a probe on a comet.