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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

A. UniVerse Alive: An Organic, Self-Made, Encoded, Familial Procreativity

Stevenson, David. Planetary Oceans. Sky & Telescope. November, 2002. As the search for extrasolar planets and life progresses, aided by new instrumentation both on earth and in space, liquid water as the indispensable medium for life seems to be prevalent throughout the universe.

Yet studies of late have, perhaps surprisingly, forced us to broaden our thinking about planets that have water oceans. It seems likely that such places are common in the universe and are not limited to a narrow range of compositions, planetary masses, or locations around stars. In fact, given the recent discoveries of oceans elsewhere in our solar system, perhaps the “habitable zone” is almost everywhere in the universe! (39)

Susskind, Leonard. Darwin’s Legacy. Physics World. July, 2009. A brief from a special issue on “How Physics is Changing Biology” by the Stanford physicist which can illustrates in our day devoid of any admissible cosmic reality how theories and models can bend so out of all shape. If, as Susskind is a leading advocate for, this universe we earthlings awaken to bubbles forth from a pointless, mechanical multiverse, how then could, almost as an insult, its hypothetical strings be compared to a genome? Yet resolve is right in front of us, as this site tries to document, if we might just reimagine a genesis universe graced by a cosmic to human genetic code.

Let us begin with the DNA of a universe. What is it and why do we believe such a thing makes sense? String theory is the key. It supposes that at extremely small distances space is a complicated higher-dimensional manifold with many — typically six — tiny “extra” dimensions in addition to the three we see in everyday life. If we could look at the universe through a super-powerful microscope, we would see that it is composed of “Tinkertoy” elements called fluxes, branes, moduli, orientifolds (and more) all arranged on a tiny knot of higher-dimensional space called a Calabi–Yau manifold. The Calabi–Yau manifold is like the basic spine of the DNA molecule, and the other elements can be arranged and rearranged in a huge variety of ways; perhaps as many ways as a real DNA molecule. (44-45)

Svoboda, Joseph. Life as an Unfolding Biocosmos. Seckbach, Joseph, ed. Life As We Know It. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. This Volume 10 in Cellular Origin and Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology series (Google for table of contents) covers the widest definition of an animate presence increasingly found everywhere. The collection goes on, as this typical citation by a University of Toronto biologist attests, to cover “deeper philosophical and theological” aspects of the “phenomenon of life.” In an alternative “Enlivened Universe” a cosmic to human self-organization fosters an ascendant personal florescence and spiritual enlightenment. From geosphere to biosphere, homosphere and on to a nascent noosphere, life and mind quickens to achieve from a planetary home its reconstructed witness from how it came to be.

Szostak, Jack. An Optimal Degree of Physical and Chemical Heterogeneity for the Origin of Life? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 366/2894, 2011. The 2009 Nobel chemist contends that matter can be seen to readily, easily, and increasingly become alive if previous conceptual doubts and constraints are relaxed. So another step is taken toward the realization of an inherently organic cosmos, which evolves through billions of years to our sentient reconstruction and potential witness.

The accumulation of pure, concentrated chemical building blocks, from which the essential components of protocells could be assembled, has long been viewed as a necessary, but extremely difficult step on the pathway to the origin of life. However, recent experiments have shown that moderately increasing the complexity of a set of chemical inputs can in some cases lead to a dramatic simplification of the resulting reaction products. Similarly, model protocell membranes composed of certain mixtures of amphiphilic molecules have superior physical properties than membranes composed of single amphiphiles. Moreover, membrane self-assembly under simple and natural conditions gives rise to heterogeneous mixtures of large multi-lamellar vesicles, which are predisposed to a robust pathway of growth and division that simpler and more homogeneous small unilamellar vesicles cannot undergo. The question of the origin of life may become less daunting once the constraints of overly well-defined laboratory experiments are appropriately relaxed. (Abstract, 2894)

Tang, Bor Luen. Many Possibilities for Life’s Emergence. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. 58/7-8, 2005. Recent discoveries of life in extreme environments imply to this National University of Singapore biochemist a robust potential for biological forms to emerge from abiotic geochemistry anywhere they can across a wide range of conditions on earth and in the cosmos.

In summary, life had appeared to emerge quickly on Earth when and where the condition became conducive, and there may be more that one “right” condition or location. Similar conditions and locations exist on several extraterrestrial bodies within the solar system. One would expect that these would also be found on other stellar systems – if not on Earth-like planets, at least on moons around Jupiter-like gaseous giants. Furthermore, there is a myriad of conceivable extraterrestrial settings where life might emerge, and probably a lot more others that we have not a clue of at the moment. That the universe is teeming with life is therefore not an overtly optimistic motion. (221)

Teerikorpi, Pekka, et al. The Evolving Universe and the Origin of Life: The Search for our Cosmic Roots. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Among such celestial panoramas, a good temporal and spatial tour with four sections: The Widening World View, Physical Laws of Nature, The Universe, and Life in the Universe. Thirty-three chapters then range from “When Science was Born” to “Human’s Role in the Universe.”

Thompson, Joanna. Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth. Quanta. July 1,, 2022. A science writer explains and praises the latest major, update contribution by Robert Hazen (search) and Shaunna Morrison, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC, Sergey Krivovichev, Kola Science Center. Murmansk, and Robert Downs, University of Arizona about the many ways that living systems have influenced our animated geological compositions. Their paper is Lumping and Splitting: Toward a Classification of Mineral Natural Kinds in American Mineralogist 107/7, 2022.

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A new survey of our planet’s minerals corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living entity systems. It’s a discovery that could provide valuable insights to scientists piecing together Earth’s complex geological history — and also to those searching for evidence of life beyond this world.

Morrison and Hazen also identified 57 processes created all known minerals. These processes included weathering, chemical precipitations, metamorphic transformations, lightning strikes, radiation, oxidation, massive impacts, and even condensations in interstellar space. The biggest single factor in mineral diversity on Earth is water in a variety of chemical and physical ways. But they also found that life is a key player whose fingerprints are on about half of all minerals.

Tielens, Xander. The Molecular Universe. Reviews of Modern Physics. Online January, 2013. The senior Leiden University astrobiologist is credited as the discoverer of large PAH Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in celestial space. His The Physics and Chemistry of the Interstellar Medium (Cambridge UP, 2010) is a 500 page review of conducive “galactic ecosystems” found to be filled with complex biomolecules.

Molecular absorption and emission bands dominate the visible, infrared, and submillimeter spectra of most objects with associated gas. These observations reveal a surprisingly rich array of molecular species and attest to a complex chemistry taking place in the harsh environment of the interstellar medium of galaxies. Molecules are truly everywhere and an important component of interstellar gas. This review surveys molecular observations in the various spectral windows and summarizes the chemical and physical processes involved in the formation and evolution of interstellar molecules. The rich organic inventory of space reflects the multitude of chemical processes involved that on the one hand build up molecules an atom at a time and on the other hand break-down large molecules injected by stars to smaller fragments. Both this bottom-up and the trickle-down chemistry are reviewed. The emphasis is on understanding the characteristics of complex Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon molecules and fullerenes and their role in chemistry as well as the intricate interaction of gas phase ion-molecule and neutral-neutral reactions and the chemistry taking place on grain surfaces in dense clouds in setting the organic inventory of regions of star and planet formation and their implications for the chemical history of the Solar system. (Abstract)

Tinetti, Giovanna, et al. Water Vapour in the Atmosphere of a Transition Extrasolar Planet. Nature. 448/169, 2007. A quite international paper by 13 researchers from Frascati, Italy, London, Paris, Taipei, Pasadena, Bellaterra, Spain, Tuscon, USA, and Lyon, France reports for the first time the finding of H2O molecules in the cloudy mantle surrounding a ‘hot Jupiter’ type planet. And so, ovular Earth, via its sentient, collaborative species, armed with such instrumentation, begins to sense the presence of life-friendly conditions across the stellar reaches.

Tirard, Stephane, et al. The Definition of Life. Astrobiology. 10/10, 2010. With coauthors Michel Morange and Antonio Lazcano, philosophers of biology press ahead in the 21st century with this “elusive scientific endeavor.” While delving into physical rootings by inclusions of the pervasive self-organization of living systems, these propensities are then set aside because they are not “genetic” in kind, and therefore do not qualify in a Darwinian way. But would not everything change if an innately organic cosmos might be admitted, whereof such dynamical agencies might take on a true, creative, “genetic” role?

Trefil, James. How Life Began. Santa Fe Institute Bulletin. Winter, 2006. Noted more in The Origin of Life section, and included here for a glimpse of a fertile cosmos which innately engenders complex creatures.

It encourages us to see life not as some highly improbable accident but as a natural outcome of the workings of the physical universe. (7)

Trefil, James, et al. The Origin of Life. American Scientist. May-June, 2009. With co-authors Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith, a state of the art review with an emphasis on the ‘metabolic network first’ approach, versus ‘RNA molecules first.’ All of which, as the quotes say, implies a Ptolemaic to Copernican, sterile machine to biological genesis, revolution.

As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth. As such, the early stages in the emergence of life are no more surprising, no more accidental, than water flowing downhill. (206) Assuming the experimental and theoretical programs outlined above work out well, our picture of life as a robust, inevitable outcome of certain geochemical processes will be on firm footing. Who knows? Maybe then someone will write a book titled Necessity, Not Chance.

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