True, his Steady-State cosmology was dead wrong, and his panspermia theories were a little sketchy, but he was the man who managed to combine the disciplines of stellar evolution and stellar structure into a coherent theory that led us to nucleogenesis. Hoyle showed us where the Periodic Table comes from, you know, all that "we are all stardust" stuff Brother Carl Sagan loved to talk about.

No, I was riffing on some sci-fi ideas I've been having, now that I've given up on space ships and radio signals, microbes sailing the stellar winds seems the only way to travel across space. I confess, I was inspired by the Protomolecule in "The Expanse", and remember, that is not a naturally evolved organism, its an artifact, a weaponized form of artificial life designed as a universal parasite for some long forgotten interstellar war, by some Type II or III civilization a long way off, a long time ago.
That's why I posted on "Mysteries" and not "Space". On second thought, though, I should have put it on "Science-Fiction".

I agree, parasites are the most highly specialized of all organisms, and they share a complex shared evolution (sometimes even a symbiotic one) with their prey. But an artificial organism might be deliberately designed to be a generalist, especially if life tends to evolve along a finite number of similar chemical pathways throughout the universe.

Of course, we don't know that, but its possible that life tends to follow parallel biochemical strategies, after all, the amino acids we have found in distant molecular clouds are exactly the same ones we have here. DNA may be the only way genetic information and protein synthesis is carried out, although there may be several (or even many) variations of it possible. An artificial virus could carry in its own DNA not only the information needed to create copies of itself, but also coded strategies for dealing with some of those variants. It might have a tool kit of numerous biochemical tools for attacking a variety of common possible biochemistries. And there would also be room for additional instructions for carrying out a more complex mission as well.

No, I agree that natural organisms from other worlds would probably be unable to get a foothold in Terrestrial critters, but I'm open to the possibility that a deliberately designed artificial life form might have enough tools to crack a natural genetic code that evolved somewhere else. Remember, it wouldn't have to be 100% successful every time, it would just have to win occasionally...and then evolution would take over.

As for surviving the voyage...well, maybe that's why god invented bucky balls. 8)