Related papers: The Origin of Chiral Life
Chirality is at the origin of life and is ubiquitous in nature. An object is deemed chiral if it is non-superimposable with its own mirror image. This relates to how circularly polarized light interacts with such object, a circular…
The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry, astrobiology, and astrophysics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mind-boggling as the riddle relating to evolution of…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The origin of life on Earth would benefit from a prebiotic atmosphere that produced nitriles, like HCN, which enable ribonucleotide synthesis. However, geochemical evidence suggests that Hadean air was relatively oxidizing with negligible…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
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…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critically important question about life phenomenon and the origins of life. In a previous paper (arXiv:1309.1229), I tentatively put forward a new hypothesis that the emergence of a single…
In this review we explore aspects of the field of astrobiology from an astronomical viewpoint. We therefore focus on the origin of life in the context of planetary formation, with additional emphasis on tracing the most abundant volatile…
It is argued that all notions associated with the origin of life should be related with the participatory anthropic principle of Wheeler and must be extended into the realm of the multiverse. Also discussed is the notion that life can only…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
The transformation of organic molecules into the simplest self-replicating living system,a microorganism, is accomplished from a unique event or rare events that occurred early in the Universe. The subsequent dispersal on cosmic scales and…
Biological macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids are composed exclusively of chirally pure monomers. The chirality consensus appears vital for life and it has even been considered as a prerequisite of life. However the primary cause…
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
The history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the universe. Since life as we know it relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the universe needs to be…
We pursue research leading towards the nature of causality in the universe. We establish the equation of the universe's evolution from the universe-state function and its series expansion, in which causes and effects connect together to…
While biologists have not yet reached a consensus on the definition of life, homochirality - the specific molecular handedness of biomolecules - is a phenomenon only produced by life. The unraveling of its origin requires interdisciplinary…
It is suggested that life originated in a three-step process referred to as the jigsaw model. RNA, proteins, or similar organic molecules polymerized in a dehydrated carbon-rich environment, on surfaces in a carbon-rich environment, or in…