>The Sun provides photons that most cells need in order to live but Desulforudis audaxviator have decoupled themselves from that source of energy. In theory they could outlast the solar system or hitch a ride on a rogue planet.
I suspect it's the opposite; first there was life and then it evolved to use sunlight.
How did life arise on earth right after the rocks stopped being red hot? The only reasonable theory in my opinion is that the original life forms were inside the rocks on some jetsam that wasn't totally molten and if you go back further, lived off a little heat and water underground, quite possibly on a "rogue planet".
One reason this seems obvious to me is that there must be orders of magnitude more planets without stars than with. Just like there are more asteroids than planets, more dim red stars than sun-like stars, etc.
The other reason is that I think it helps a great deal with the Fermi paradox. If life just zapped into existence on Earth, 4.5 billion years ago, then it could've happened at any time, anywhere else, over the prior (almost) 10 billion years or so.
But if it took most of that time, since the Big Bang, to develop what we think of as the most primitive life, in the much larger arena of rubble or rogue planets in deep space, then it looks more like we are the earliest life that could develop, and that's why we wouldn't have been overrun by space invaders.
Looking the exponential development of life, even if you choose somewhat arbitrary milestones, it's basically a self-similar curve; each "step" takes a fraction of the previous one. Going backwards, each step should take the corresponding multiple. The great oxidation event was about 2.5 billion years ago. The first life we know about was about twice that. It seems to me a near perfect fit, timing wise, for the origin of that life to be about twice that ago, rather than suddenly arise from nothing in a few million years.
What it comes down to is I think creationists who are skeptical of abiogenesis really have a good point, about how the simplest life is unbelievably complex, in spite of not having a viable theory to explain it. But I think the answer is staring us in the face.
And of course panspermia isn't new or my idea particularly, but what bugs me is instead of saying there needs to be more evidence, it should be the default assumption. Our environment is just not representative of most of the universe even if you ignore non-baryonic dark matter.