Life violates thermodynamics unless an external information source exists. The replication gap—biological systems replicate 10⁹ times more efficiently than any known chemical process—cannot emerge from atomic properties alone¹,². Early Earth contained only three variables: atoms, chemistry, and solar radiation. Since atoms demonstrate zero replicative will and chemistry achieves at best 10⁻⁶ replications/second³,⁴, only solar photons remain as the differentiating factor. We demonstrate that photosynthesis captures not just energy but information, with different organisms decoding identical photons into species-specific replication instructions⁵,⁶. The Mpemba effect—hot water freezing faster than cold⁷—provides independent evidence of selective entropy removal, suggesting photons can decrease entropy in template-matched systems. Solar radiation delivers 10⁴⁵ photons/second to Earth⁸, each potentially carrying both energy (E = hν) and semantic content decoded by biological receivers. Using information theory and thermodynamic analysis, we show P(Life|Atoms+Chemistry) < 10⁻⁶⁰ while P(Life|Atoms+Chemistry+Solar_Templates) ≈ 1. This deduction suggests solar photons carry species-specific instruction sets that bridge the impossible gap between dead matter and self-replicating life.