Bacteria = Von Neumann Machines

I decided that bacteria are actually little Von Newmann machines, self-replicating machines, slowly inching their way through the Universe, spreading some unknown message. I'm pretty convinced that life on Earth got here by riding a comet or asteroid, and now we have evolved to the point where we're sending the little bacteria we missed when we disinfected our spacecraft on to infect all the other planets and moons in our solar system and beyond. Where and when did life begin? Well, I don't know where, but I'm guessing it began not too long after things cooled off enough to hold DNA together, a result of a signal from the "future" that brought it all together. It's a pretty good strategy. Bacteria are tough, and we know they can survive a long time in space. The hardest part would be encoding the message in the DNA so it wouldn't get destroyed or lost or replaced by viral DNA over the millennia.