Related papers: Life Before Earth
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
Research over the past 25 years has led to the view that the rich tapestry of present-day cosmic structure arose during the first instants of creation, where weak ripples were imposed on the otherwise uniform and rapidly expanding…
This note presents a minimal approach to the origin of life, following standard ideas. We pay special attention to the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and in particular to detailed balance. As a consequence we…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Artificial Life provides the opportunity to study the emergence and evolution of simple ecosystems in real time. We give an overview of the advantages and limitations of such an approach, as well as its relation to individual-based modeling…
Since the Hadean era of Earth's history, peptides/proteins and RNA have undergone a complex evolutionary trajectory. Originating from simple monomeric units, these molecules evolved abiotically under various biochemical and biophysical…
The driving force behind the origin and evolution of life has been the thermodynamic imperative of increasing the entropy production of the biosphere through increasing the global solar photon dissipation rate. In the upper atmosphere of…
Noble gases are powerful probes of the Earth's early history, as they are chemically inert. Neon isotopic ratios in deep mantle plumes suggest that nebular gases were incorporated into the Earth's interior. This evidence implies the Earth's…
An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place --…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
We review some basic issues of the life-prescribed development of the Earth's system and the Earth's atmosphere and discourse the unity of Earth's type of life in physical and transcendental divisions. In physical division, we exemplify and…
The widespread presence of ribonucleic acid (RNA) catalysts and cofactors in Earth's biosphere today suggests that RNA was the first biopolymer to support Darwinian evolution. However, most "path-hypotheses" to generate building blocks for…
We study the build up of complexity on the example of 1 kg matter in different forms. We start on the simplest example of ideal gases, and then continue with more complex chemical, biological, life and social and technical structures. We…
The search for life in the universe mainly uses modern Earth as a template. However, we know that Earth's atmospheric composition changed significantly through its geological evolution. Recent discoveries show that transiting, potentially…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
This paper aims to justify the concept of natural intelligence, the type of intelligence wider than human intelligence and its derivative, AI. I will argue that the process of life is a cognitive process and that organisms, from bacteria to…
We carry out 3-D numerical simulations to assess the penetration and bombardment effects of Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs), i.e. high-energy particle bursts during large flares and superflares, on ancient and current Mars. We demonstrate…