III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

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

Skar, John and Peter Coveney, eds. Self-organization: The Quest for the Origin and Evolution of Structure. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A. 361/6, 2003. A Nobel Symposium considers the growing realization of an innate dynamical drive toward emergent complexity from space-time to ecosystems. Altogether these findings imply a quite different animate, oriented universe which seems to develop akin to a living organism.

In summary then, self-organization seems to be characterized by the almost spontaneous creation of global or semi-global patterns developed from local interactions among independent and autonomous components or agents. (1054)

Smith, Eric. Before Darwin. The Scientist. 22/6, 2008. An article in this ‘Magazine of the Life Sciences’ wherein the Santa Fe Institute biologist observes that evolution may be off-putting for the general public because it is not rooted in a conductive physical or chemical substrate. Smith, often a collaborator with Harold Morowitz, contends that ecological principles of metabolic biosynthesis in fact are in place prior to Darwinian selection and would serve as an inherently fertile milieu for life’s origin. An extensive technical piece by Eric Smith on the “Thermodynamics of Natural Selection” is noted in the A Thermodynamics of Life section.

When we consider what would be required for metabolism to have self-organized without supervision, we realize there a rich, hierarchical, modular structure of the extant metabolism of the biosphere that looks far from accidental. The functions that particular chemicals fulfill, in the context of both the network and the constraints of the geochemical environment, suggest that the presence of these chemicals as a foundation for life may be required from first principles. (38)

Smith, Eric, et al. Core Metabolism as a Self-Organized System. Rasmussen, Steen, et al, eds. Protocells: Bridging Nonliving and Living Matter. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Along with Harold Morowitz and Shelley Copley, an attempt to root animate activity in a physical ground with dynamically fertile propensities. In so doing, initial ‘ergodic’ processes are seen to explore a range of configurations, from which a preferred state or ‘contingency’ is selected, but guided by an essential self-creativity.

Life exists in a nonequilibrium flux of energy flowing both from the sun and from geochemical sources, through the biosphere, to heat that is radiated into space. Here, we develop the view that the basic chemical reaction networks that underlie life have emerged as a form of structure that is a direct result of the prebiotic version of this energy flow. The emergence of these structures during the origin of life is a particular instance of more general thermodynamic phenomena in which sources of unrelaxed free energy can spontaneously induce ordered dynamical states that create channels for their relaxation by means of energy flow through the channels. (433) The proposition that a self-organized protometabolism emerged deterministically as the first step toward life is also a proposition that the dynamics of life are continuous with the dynamics of geochemistry, particularly in the realm of metabolism. (435)

Smith, Ian, et al, eds. Astrochemistry and Astrobiology. Berlin: Springer, 2013. Reviewed more in Astrobiology, an epic scientific discovery is underway of an animate cosmic materiality that seems predisposed to spawn and form complex, proactive, biomolecules into protocellular vital systems.

Smolin, Lee. The Self-organization of Space and Time.. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A. 361/1081, 2003. Further insights into a relational universe which evolves into sentient complexity because these properties favor its cosmic replication through populations of black holes. A 2003 talk by Lee Smolin on "Science and Democracy" where he lucidly presents the physical necessity of a self-organizing cosmos is now posted online at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lee_smolin_on_science_and_democracy.html.

Smoot, George. Wrinkles in Time. New York: Morrow, 1993. The astrophysicist who led the COBE satellite team which detected primordial ripples as seeds for galaxy formation offers a diametricly opposite view from his mentor Steven Weinberg, showing how much ones predilection colors what is seen.

I must disagree with my old teacher. To me the universe seems quite the opposite of pointless. It seems that the more we learn, the more we see how it all fits together - how there is an underlying unity to the sea of matter and stars and galaxies that surround us. Likewise, as we study the universe as a whole, we realize that the “microcosm” and the “macrocosm” are, increasingly, the same subject. By unifying them, we are learning that nature is as it is not because it is the chance consequence of a random series of meaningless events; quite the opposite. More and more, the universe appears to be as it is because it must be this way; its evolution was written in its beginnings - in its cosmic DNA, if you will. There is a clear order to the evolution of the universe, moving from simplicity and symmetry to greater complexity and structure. (296)

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.”

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