Related papers: Origin of Life
The hypothesis that Earth was intentionally seeded with life by a preceding extraterrestrial civilization is believed to be currently untestable. However, analysis of the situation where humans themselves embark on seeding other planetary…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
The original hypothesis about Three-stage origin of life (TOL) on the Earth is developed and discussed. The role of the temperature factor in life origin is considered. It is supposed, that three stages of abiogenesis (DNA world, RNA world…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
The origin and early evolution of eukaryotes are one of the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. One of its most interesting aspects is the emergence of cellular organelles, their dynamics, their functions, and their…
Natural panspermia is a transport-and-establishment hypothesis, not a theory of abiogenesis. The Earth-specific question is whether any nonterrestrial donor remains competitive with terrestrial origin once launch, planetary-system escape,…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
It is fair to say that the deepest mystery in our understanding of nature is the birth of our universe. Much of the dilemma over the last decades comes from the extraordinarily small probability that the universe started with the high…
The chiral puzzle of biological molecules is thought to be closely related to the origin of life and is still a mystery so far. Previously, we proposed a new model on the origin of life, Nebula-Relay hypothesis, which assumed that the life…
The early phase of cosmic evolution is still a great topic of interest to the cosmologist community. Especially the mechanism behind the origin of the Universe is yet to be resolved. Most people believe in the Big Bang models (singular…
The hypothesis that the rapid appearance of life on Earth justifies the belief that life is widespread in the universe has been investigated statistically by Lineweaver and Davis. However, a rapid appearance could also be interpreted as…
A simple, heuristic formula with parallels to the Drake Equation is introduced to help focus discussion on open questions for the origins of life in a planetary context. This approach indicates a number of areas where quantitative progress…
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
It is undeniable that life as we know it depends on liquid water. It is difficult to imagine any biochemical machinery that does not require water. On Earth, life adapts to the most diverse environments and, once established, it is very…
In this article, we attempt to convince the reader that the origin of life was such an exceptionally unlikely event that it probably has never occurred elsewhere. This involves an explicit calculation using the laws of physics which, while…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Several aspects of mathematical astrobiology are discussed. It is argued that around the time of the origin of life the handedness of biomolecules must have established itself through an instability. Possible pathways of producing a certain…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…