| | | Long read, just posting abstract and Intro...emergence of abiogenic life. I'll leave it to Stockpuppy and Didjuneau to debate the details <g>.
arxiv.org
The unreasonable likelihood of being
Origin of life, terraforming, and AI
Robert G. EndresDepartment of Life Sciences, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
Abstract
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Using estimates grounded in modern computational models, we evaluate the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under plausible prebiotic conditions. Our results highlight the formidable entropic and informational barriers to forming a viable protocell within the available window of Earth’s early history. While the idea of Earth being terraformed by advanced extraterrestrials might violate Occam’s razor from within mainstream science, directed panspermia—originally proposed by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel—remains a speculative but logically open alternative. Ultimately, uncovering physical principles for life’s spontaneous emergence remains a grand challenge for biological physics.
Beginnings
“All cells come from cells” [ 1] leads us into a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: where did the first cell come from? Either it came from somewhere else—conveniently outsourcing the mystery—or it emerged from the laws of physics and chemistry on a young, chaotic, and geologically active Earth. Once a minimal protocell or replicator emerged, Darwinian evolution could take over, merely selecting and diversifying its way toward greater complexity, biodiversity, and eventually, the modern biosphere, from gold fish to particle accelerators and social media. One thing this onset of a discussion illustrates - how little we know about our origin, and the cosmos in general.
As for the “somewhere else” hypothesis, science fiction has long entertained terraforming scenarios. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, an inscrutable black monolith gives early hominins a mysterious push toward cognition—and tool use [ 2]. In Star Trek, entire planetary ecosystems are engineered by advanced civilizations or errant AI, often with remarkable speed [ 3]. The X-Files proposed that alien viruses might have seeded Earth, albeit oddly fixated on rural America [ 4]. In Prometheus, a lone extraterrestrial—credited only as “the Engineer”—dissolves himself in a waterfall, presumably catalyzing Earth’s biochemistry, though the narrative coherence dissolves nearly as fast [ 5]. The mother of all terraforming stories is, however, the Book of Genesis, written more than 2,500 years ago. It declares that life was created in six days [ 6] — a claim that has profoundly shaped human thought, even if not amenable to scientific testing.
One step closer to science (though not necessarily to certainty), Francis Crick—the co-discoverer of DNA’s structure—and Leslie Orgel proposed in 1973 the idea of directed panspermia [ 7]. In their scenario, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, facing extinction or perhaps scientific curiosity, dispatches microbial “starter kits” to habitable planets like ours (see Fig. 1 for an illustration). While Crick and Orgel attempted to formulate this idea more like a testable hypothesis, it deftly relocates the explanatory burden to someone else’s biochemistry.
Meanwhile, modern Bayesian analyses of life’s emergence struggle with deeply unconstrained data (or lack thereof): a sample size of one, and priors shaped not only by empirical observation but also by immense subjectivity [ 8, 9]. There’s also the problem of timing—life appeared early on Earth, yet the intelligent observer required to marvel this fact arrived very much later, introducing a strong observational bias. In this work, we revisit the origin of life through the lens of modern cell models and AI-based tools, to better appreciate the informational and physical complexity required for protocell formation. We begin with general considerations and propose a qualitative theoretical framework. Finally, we follow Feynman’s mantra that ”doubt and uncertainty are not to be feared but welcomed” [ 10], and attempt to cautiously conclude something. |
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