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My own not-even-a-hypothesis feeling about this is that cycles are required. Here me out: Earth life first put a surface around the seawater it was in. Each c
by at_a_remove 3y ago
My own not-even-a-hypothesis feeling about this is that cycles are required.
Here me out: Earth life first put a surface around the seawater it was in. Each cell is really a bag of saline (unless you're a plant and then you have rigid walls) plus other stuff. That was encapsulated. Anyone who has kept saltwater fish knows that they only do well in a narrow range of temperatures, salinity, and so forth.
Then creatures thermoregulated, carrying the necessary temperatures for life within themselves. Slow down at night. Basking in the sun: an innovation. Feathers, then fur. Brown fat cells. All this to keep our interior seawater just so.
But what if what kickstarted life wasn't just chemistry, but the cycles applied to the chemistry? A warm little pond, a soup all of its own. New unreacted chemicals (nutrients) rain in. A bit of tide washes out the chemicals at the bottom of the entropy chain (waste). Rain in, wash out, over and over, allowing for a concentration. Dump chemicals in an unmoving tank of water, they head toward equilibrium, but have them surging in and out, you can get interesting stuff. Rain in, wash out; inhale, exhale; eat, excrete; heartbeat. All cycles. Urea cycle, Krebs cycle, glyoxylate cycle. Once you step back to see that life works as repeated cycles of chemistry, well, we probably needed cycles to get started, just as we needed chemistry and other conditions to get started. We incorporated those cycles because life is not static, it persists because it repeats.
So perhaps -- and this is just a perhaps -- not only does life need one "set" of chemistry or another to begin (maybe arsenic instead of phosphorus, hydrogen sulfide instead of water), it needs cycles, interlocking cycles. So not just a year with seasons, but day and night (tidally locked planets need not apply), and even tides (hope you have a moon) would be needed. The more cycles to piggyback upon, the more opportunities for chemistry to capture, repeat, and encapsulate those cycles, to self-perpetuate.
Just something I wonder about.
- _nhynes 3y agoAnd that units of computation are called cycles is no coincidence right?
- alanbernstein 3y agoHere's a rough metaphor for you: life is an engine (running cyclically) but it needs a manual kickstart (existing cycles) to get going.
- at_a_remove 3y agoMore or less, yes. Very sloppily at first. My "look for life here" candidates are basically planets (or moons!) where a liquid solvent is present (so you can have chemistry happen more readily), warmer (faster reaction, so you can have the chemistry happen faster, and therefore again and again), and with cycles (not tidally locked, a moon helps). I'm still something of a carbon chauvinist, but I am open to different solvents and other chemistries.
- evandale 3y agoI love this theory and it seems very plausible. Cycles are everywhere in the world and it's impossible to avoid them. I wonder if that's why are brains want to find patterns all the time. We need cycles and patterns because they represent stability. Once you have stability then you can focus on improvements because you have a baseline. Your baseline is like your save file you reset to when your experiments go wrong. It really seems like you can apply this to almost anything in life.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoYou might want to read some of Nick Lanes' work, he's a biochemist researching abiogenesis etc but has written a number of popular works, which I found very compelling https://nick-lane.net/ https://nick-lane.net/ He is in particular concerned with exactly the chemistry and physics aspect of the origin of life. In particular his summary of the theory of alkaline "warm" hydrothermal chemistry & the early earth and the origin of life is very compelling. Essentially such areas are theorized to have created physical protocells at the chemical and energy boundaries between the sea water and the alkaline hydrothermal vents. The naturally occurring molecules there apparently present aspects similar to a hypothetical early cell, and yes, bags of saline. But also the relevant point is the interaction of energy across this barrier. And eventually something "escaped" from this system that was able to "create" a similar system or sustain itself in other environments. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2019/nov/deep-sea-vents-had-ideal-conditions-origin-life https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2019/nov/deep-sea-vents-had-ideal...