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

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

Bisbas, Thomas, et al. α-enhanced Astrochemistry: the Carbon cycle in extreme galactic conditions. arXiv:2312.03237. Eleven computational astroscientists mainly in China along with France, Germany and South Africa provide another December paper (see Wu, Qin Tong herein) with verifications of an innate, life-breeding fertility across the celestial expanses. Initial discoveries that biological molecules and reactions suffused the ISM arose in the 1970s. We place these papers in an UniVerse Alive section since maybe into these 2020s it could at last be possible to realize and affirm a revolutionary genesis ecosmic universe.

Astrochemistry has proceeded as a way to quantify elemental and molecular properties of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way (MW) vicinity, and near and distant galaxies. Most current studies apply linear scaling to abundances based on their gas-phase metallicity. However, these elements are enriched differentially by stellar nucleosynthesis and galactic chemical evolution, evident from α-enhancement in multiple galactic observations such as starbursts, high-redshift star-forming galaxies, and low-metallicity dwarfs. We perform astrochemical modeling to simulate the impact of an α-enhanced ISM gas cloud on the abundances of the three phases of carbon (C+, C, CO) dubbed as `the carbon cycle'. (Excerpt)

What is alpha enhancement? The ratio of alpha process elements to iron, also known as the alpha-enhancement, is written as the logarithm of the alpha process elements O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, Ar, Ca, and Ti to Fe compared to that of the Sun.

Boeyens, Jan. Chemical Cosmology. Berlin: Springer, 2010. A South African chemist, in the 1990s University of Witwatersrand dean of science, now at the University of Pretoria, proposes akin to quantum cosmology, a deep affinity between chemical and celestial realms and geometries, but with a major difference. While the (Ptolemaic) physics paradigm denies any intrinsic reality or constancy of pattern, if such a presence might be admitted, as tradition well knows, then a “universal self-similarity” can again be observed and discovered. From atoms to organisms to galaxies, nature employs and recycles the same topologies, which necessarily arise from a common mathematical source. If we might lately turn our gaze from hadron depths to real affinities from molecule to communities to nebulae, an edifying micro/macro reiteration can indeed be revealed.

We conclude that the organization of atomic matter is self-similar with the arrangement of planetary systems and conditioned by the same design principles recognized in biological growth and in galaxies. (163)

Brandenburg, Axel and David Hochberg. Introduction to Origins of Biological Homochirality. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. 52/1-3, 2022. Stockholm University and Center for Astrobiology, Madrid editors open a special issue for the latest research on life’s deep tendency to branch into relative left or right topological phases See, for example, Symmetry Breaking by Consecutive Amplification by Laura Huber and Oliver Trapp (view his website), Biological Homochirality and the Search for Extraterrestrial Biosignatures by Marcelo Gleiser, et al, Molecular Self-Assembly as a Trigger of Life Origin and Development by Dmitry Zlenko, et al, and Frontiers in Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments by Ulrich Muller, et al.

The chemistry of terrestrial life is based on a spatial molecular asymmetry whose three dimensional geometrical structure or conformation is not identical to that of their mirror image or spatial reflections though a mirror. The parity P, or space inversion, is a discrete symmetry transformation in physics, and is broken at the molecular level. Such molecules thus possess homochirality or handedness. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and the sugar backbones present in DNA and RNA are chiral molecules. Chirality constitutes a unifying feature of the living world and is a prime driving force for genetic evolution and biologic selection. (First paragraph)

Most amino acids and sugar molecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other, knowns as enantiomers. However, life on Earth is mostly homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA and DNA. We review potential mechanisms for biological homochirality on primal Earth an their implications for astrobiology: that it is a stochastic process driven by local environmental fluctuations; second, that it is driven by circularly-polarized ultraviolet radiation in star-forming regions; and that it is driven by parity violation at the elementary particle level. (Gleiser, et al)

Homochirality is a uniformity of chirality, or handedness. Objects are chiral when they cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, the left and right hands of a human are approximately mirror images of each other but are not their own mirror images, so they are chiral. In biology, 19 of the 20 natural amino acids are homochiral, being L-chiral (left-handed), while sugars are D-chiral (right-handed). (Wikipedia)

Branscomb, Elbert and Michael Russell. On the Beneficent Thickness of Water. Interface Focus. October, 2019. In an 80th birthday festschrift for the NASA astrobiologist Michael Russell, he and the University of Illinois biochemist (search) wax over how amazing is it that life’s fluid bath seems to inherently possess extraordinarily ideal properties so as simple and complex cells and peoples can come into being.

In the 1930s, Lars Onsager published his famous ‘reciprocal relations’ describing free energy conversion processes, which assumed that the fluxes involved in the conversion were proportional to the forces driving them. For chemical reactions, this condition holds only for systems close to equilibrium. Soon thereafter, it was observed that in some biological conversions both the reciprocal relations and linear flux–force dependency appeared to be obeyed no matter how far from equilibrium the system was being driven. No explanation for this ‘paradoxical’ behaviour has emerged and it has remained a mystery. We here argue, however, that this anomalous behaviour is simply a gift of water, of its viscosity in particular; a gift, moreover, without which life almost certainly could not have emerged. (Abstract excerpt)

Buchanan, Mark. Birds of a Feather. Nature Physics. 9/7, 2013. In this month’s column, the physicist writer reports on the work of Cristina Marchetti, et al, and Andrea Cavagna, et al (search each) about how “scale-free collectives of interacting, self-propelling elements” from microbes to flocks and every animal assembly are becoming known as a natural form of “active matter.” Casting back, the term is akin to Vladimir Vernadsky’s 1920s citation of “living matter.” In our worldwide midst, a revolution thus seems in process from material substance as stone-cold passive to an increasing reanimation, taking flight on its own. “Deep analogs” indeed appear between growth and ground, a conducive spacescape, as a 21st century genesis uniVerse dawns.

Even more active is a colony of bacteria, each member of which can carry out sustained motion as well as complex signaling and coordination with others. Or think of a flock of birds or herd of migratory animals. Despite obvious differences, these systems all share a similar character as collectives of interacting and self-propelling elements with internal sources of energy. It’s natural to think of all of these as examples of a more general kind of “active” matter – a new frontier where ideas from physics on the principles of order and organization are proving very useful. (387)

This is interesting as it suggests some kind of evolutionary tuning of interactions to produce optimal sensitivity in the group’s ability to respond to signals gathered by any one member. But there’s a deep analogy to physics too. Indeed, the interactions between birds seem to be organized in a ‘scale-free’ way, with the flock’s sensitive dynamics closely linked to the behavior of a physical substance held near a critical point between an organized and disorganized phase. (387)

Caetano-Anolles, Gustavo, ed. Evolutionary Genomics and Systems Biology. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. The editor is a University of Illinois Professor of Bioinformatics and Agricultural Sciences who has put together an extraordinary collection by leading practitioners on the breadth, robustness and maturity of a 21st century science of systems genetics. Typical, notable papers are “The Role of Information in Evolutionary Genomics of Bacteria” by Antoine Danchin and Agnieszka Sekowska (search), “Genotypes and Phenotypes in the Evolution of Molecules” by Peter Schuster, “Evolution of Metabolic Networks” Eivind Almaas, and “Modularity and Dissipation in Evolution of Macromolecular Structures, Functions, and Networks” by Caetano-Anolles, Liudmila Yafremava and Jay Mittenthal which, as the quote below, situates living systems within and as the result of a cosmic thermodynamic drive.

We have been considering biological evolution. Now we broaden evolution’s meaning by considering it in a cosmological sense. Several central questions can be posed. What are the fundamental evolutionary drivers of EDS (emergent dissipative systems) organization and complexity? How does dissipation of energy and matter contribute to EDS formation? We contend the answer lies in information. (Caetano-Anolles, 435)

Cantine, Marjorie and Gregory Fournier. Environmental Adaptation from the Origin of Life to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. Online July, 2017. Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, MIT researchers analytically and graphically display this initial two billion year span when living proto-cellular formations began to arise and evolve. Again, by the tripartite union of replicative modes, closed compartments, and rudimentary metabolism, life’s nested cellularity was on its course all the way to our late reconstruction. For this section, the presence of an innately organic, conducive, habitable cosmos becomes robustly evident.

Extensive fundamental molecular and biological evolution took place between the prebiotic origins of life and the state of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Considering the evolutionary innovations between these two endpoints from the perspective of environmental adaptation, we explore the hypothesis that LUCA was temporally, spatially, and environmentally distinct from life’s earliest origins in an RNA world. Using this lens, we interpret several molecular biological features as indicating an environmental transition between a cold, radiation-shielded origin of life and a mesophilic, surface-dwelling LUCA. Cellularity provides motility and permits Darwinian evolution by connecting genetic material and its products, and thus establishing heredity and lineage. Considering the importance of compartmentalization and motility, we propose that the early emergence of cellularity is required for environmental dispersal and diversification during these transitions. Early diversification and the emergence of ecology before LUCA could be an important pre-adaptation for life’s persistence on a changing planet. (Abstract)

Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. The nonlinear sciences of self-organization, chaos theory, thermodynamics and fractal complexity are artfully integrated as a basis for an ecological philosophy. An entire chapter is devoted to the “self-making” role of autopoietic systems.

Carter, Brandon. Hominid Evolution: Genetics versus Memetics. International Journal of Astrobiology. 11/1, 2011. The CNRS Paris Observatory theorist, a prime conceiver of the Anthropic Principle, offers another take on how human beings might be considered as cosmically meant to be. See also Carter, 2011 in Anthropic and Biotropic Principle. Albeit technical excursions, we seem to be closing to something but not yet there whence people are a functional phenomenon of a greater reality and genesis.

The last few million years on planet Earth have witnessed two remarkable phases of hominid development, starting with a phase of biological evolution characterized by rather rapid increase of the size of the brain. This has been followed by a phase of even more rapid technological evolution and concomitant expansion of the size of the population that began when our own particular ‘sapiens’ species emerged, just a few hundred thousand years ago. The present investigation exploits the analogy between the neo-Darwinian genetic evolution mechanism governing the first phase, and the memetic evolution mechanism governing the second phase. From the outset of the latter until very recently – about the year 2000 – the growth of the global population N was roughly governed by an equation of the form dN/Ndt=N/T*, in which T* is a coefficient introduced by von Foerster, (1960) who evaluated it empirically as about 200,000 million years. It is shown here how the value of this hitherto mysterious timescale governing the memetic phase is explicable in terms of what happened in the preceding genetic phase. The outcome is that the order of magnitude of the Foerster timescale can be accounted for as the product of the relevant (human) generation timescale, about 20 years, with the number of bits of information in the genome, of the order of 10,000 million. Whereas the origin of our ‘homo’ genus may well have involved an evolutionary hard step, it transpires that the emergence of our particular ‘sapiens’ species was rather an automatic process. (Abstract)

Chen, Irene and Martin Nowak. From Prelife to Life: How Chemical Kinetics Become Evolutionary Dynamics. Accounts of Chemical Research. 45/12, 2012. Premier scientists at Harvard University join their Origins laboratory and Behavioral studies to consider and evoke an apparent natural genesis which seamlessly develops by the same impetus and vital forms from cosmos to children. Irene Chen, a biophysicist, is Bauer Fellow at the FAS Center for Systems Biology. Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist and author (search), directs the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Once again an active material ground is no longer “inorganic” but in some way expectant, gravid with life’s infinitely repetitive, emergent patterns, processes, and stirring sentience.

A crucial question for the origin of life is the following: when do chemical kinetics become evolutionary dynamics? In this Account, we review properties of “prelife” and discuss the transition from prelife to life. We describe prelife as a chemical system where activated monomers can copolymerize into macromolecules such as RNA. These macromolecules carry information, and their physical and chemical properties depend to a certain extent on their particular sequence of monomers. We consider prelife as a logical precursor of life, where macromolecules are formed by copolymerization, but they cannot replicate. Prelife can undergo “prevolutionary dynamics”, including processes such as mutation, selection, and cooperation. Prelife selection, however, is blunt: small differences in rate constants lead to small differences in abundance. Life emerges with the ability of replication. In the resulting evolutionary dynamics, selection is sharp: small differences in rate constants can lead to large differences in abundance. (Abstract excerpt)

Chon-Torres, Ovtavio, et al. Astrobiocentrism: reflections on challenges in the transition to a vision of life and humanity in space. International Journal of Astrobiology. February, 2024. Universidad de Lima, ICTP, Trieste, Italy, Lund University, Umeå University, Sweden. King’s College London, CSIC-UCM, Madrid, Universitat Bern, Bern and Bethany College, KS, USA astroscholars including Julian Chela-Flores and David Dunér introduce an engaging, mid 2020s, appreciation of a life-friendly, conducive ecosmos either by an evolutionary genesis on Earth-like analogs, or by human expansion into and colonization of the nearer and further galactic ezpanse.

Astrobiocentrism is a vision that places us in a confirmation of life in the universe, either as a second genesis or as an expansion of humanity in space. Unlike biocentrism or ecocentrism, the astrobiocentric view is not limited to the Earth-centric perspective for it incorporates a multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary understanding. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to be a reflection on the astrobiocentric issues related to the challenges and problems of the discovery of life in the universe. Here we explore some aspects of the transition from biogeocentrism, astrobio-semiotics, homo mensura, moral community, planetary sustainability and astrotheology perspectives.

Coleman, Gavin and William DeRocco. Predicting the Galactic population of free-floating planets from realistic initial conditions. arXiv:2407.05992. We cite this entry by Queen Mary University of London and UC, Santa Cruz exophysicists for its content as it gathers and conveys an early quantified observance of an interstellar spacescape populated with diverse planetary entities. See also Resonant and Ultra-short-period Planet Systems are at Opposite Ends of the Exoplanet Age Distribution at arXiv:2407.04765 for another view.

But then in regard, we wonder if this milieu might be imagined as some manner of amniotic ocean suffused with potential ovular or seed-like objects. Indeed a prior article entitled An Amniotic Universe by Carl Sagan in the Atlantic Monthly (April 1979) does evoke a fluid cosmic fertility. Anyway, these musings are the sort of total reconception, decades later, that our revolutionary worldwise science invites.

We present the first prediction for the mass distribution function of Galactic free-floating planets (FFPs) that aims to include multiple formation pathways and stellar populations. We derive our results from simulations of planet birth, growth, migration, circumbinary systems and from wide binary systems. We find that interactions with circumbinary systems are the main progenitor for FFPs more massive than Earth, leading to a power-law that agrees well with the observations. In contrast, we find -planet scatterings likely produce planets at Mars mass and below, with a shallower power-law. The features we predict in the mass distribution of FFPs will be detectable by upcoming space-based microlensing surveys. (Excerpt)

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