Would genome mapper Francis Crick be permitted to suggest that intelligent aliens seeded the universe today?

Over at Uncommon Descent, someone posted a comment in response to the post that is also linked here, askng whether genome mapper Francis Crick's suggestion that aliens had seeded life in our universe would be entertained today. (Crick was stumped by the diffiiculties accounting for the origin of life.)

XXX, I am going to take a flyer on this and say that even Crick would probably be shunned if he said that today.

Back when Crick was a younger, fresher salad, materialists ASSUMED that they could come up with a materialist explanation for the origin of life.
They didn’t know that, they assumed it.

And Stanley Miller’s experiment had already convinced them that finding the origin of life was within reach, once they stumbled on a fortuitous circumstance - They were much like cavers (spelunkers) finding a long-dead pirate’s treasure in a cave on an island where key sources attest that he left it.

Under those circumstances, materialists could be expansive. Those materialists too ready to declare a victory based on the latest speculation could well afford to suffer a little smacking down from a senior Nobelist, a little reminder that all quests are difficult by nature.

Who really believed, after all, that aliens had seeded the universe?
All Crick was doing was raising the bar. Asking them to definitively rule out intelligence as an explanation.

The TROUBLE was that the bar was really way higher than Crick was proposing to raise it.
Today, it is all different. Anyone who proposes that intelligent design is the best explanation had better have someone’s army behind him. And evidence does not matter. Mathematical probability does not matter. Nothing matters but saving materialism.

And that - of course - is behind the move to rid universities of people like Gonzalez, who have (or may have) evidence that materialism is not true.

So materialists are in no mood to consider objections to their view.