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

G. An Astrochemistry to Astrobiological Spontaneity

Fraix-Burnet, Didier. Phylogenetic Concepts of Classification and Taxonomy. arXiv:1606.01631. A latest posting by the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble natural philosopher about his project, with colleagues, to discern and construct an Astrocladistics (Google) for galactic diversities akin to systematic groupings of organisms. Survey this e-print site for many prior articles. See also The Phylogeny of Quasars (1702.02468) and Phylogenetic Tools in Astrophysics (1703.00286) for more. A whole scale Cosmic Cladistics then seems a thought away so as to complete a universe to us developmental genesis.

Frank, Adam. Cosmic Abodes of Life. Discover Magazine. May, 2009. Rather than discrete, isolated, Tatooine-like worlds, solar, galactic, and even multiverse realms are coming to be considered as conducive spacescapes for ever-broadening definitions of viable systems.

Today our conception of life in the universe is being turned on its head as scientists are finding a whole lot of inviting real estate out there. As a result, they are beginning to think not in terms of single places to look for life but in terms of “habitable zones” – maps of the myriad places where living things could conceivably thrive beyond Earth. Such abodes of life may lie on other planets and moons throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe, and even beyond. (48)

Frank, Adam, et al. The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution of Exo-Civilizations and Their Planetary Feedback. Astrobiology. 18/3, 2018. University of Rochester astronomer Frank, University of Washington urban planner Marina Alberti, and MPI Biogeochemistry thermophysicist Axel Kleidon continue their project (Frank 2017) to situate our home Earth into its cosmic scenario of stochastic evolutionary habitability. A proper appreciation of the chancy biospheric course from life’s origins to our technical societies might better inform and motivate what we need to do in order to achieve a viable, long-term survival and futurity. The extended Abstract lays out a theoretic and practical analysis and program. See also Frank’s new book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth and his Atlantic Monthly essay (June 2018). While this precious, rarest ovoworld remains consumed by retro-nationalism, sectarian factions and gross military conflict, lately planning for war in space, an expansive vista of how Great Earth could be amongst a fertile raiment might serve to turn, move, unite, and save us.

A follow up paper by this team is Triggering A Climate Change Dominated "Anthropocene": Is It Common Among Exocivilizations? at arXiv:2103.06330 which proceeds with these analyses - see second Abstract.

We present a framework for studying generic behaviors possible in the interaction between a resource-harvesting technological civilization (an exo-civilization) and the planetary environment in which it evolves. Using methods from dynamical systems theory, we introduce a suite of simple equations modeling a population which consumes resources while running a technological civilization and the feedback those resources impose on the host planet.. Our models conceptualize the problem primarily in terms of feedbacks from the resource use onto the coupled planetary systems: (1) Civilization-planetary interaction with a single resource; (2) Civilization-planetary interaction with two resources each of which has a different level of planetary system feedback; (3) Civilization-planetary interaction with two resources and nonlinear planetary feedback (i.e., runaways). We find smooth entries into long-term, “sustainable” steady states, along with population booms followed by various levels of “die-off” and rapid “collapse” trajectories. Our results are part of a program for developing an “Astrobiology of the Anthropocene” in which questions of sustainability, centered on the coupled Earth-system, can be seen in their proper astronomical/planetary context. (Abstract excerpts)

We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the kind humanity is experiencing now might be a generic feature of planet-civilization evolution. In this study we focus on the effects of energy harvesting via combustion and vary the planet's initial atmospheric chemistry and orbital radius. We also assume the existence of a Complex Life Habitable Zone in which very high levels of CO2 are detrimental to multi-cellular animal life such as those creating technological civilizations. (2103.06330 Abstract excerpt)

Fridlund, Malcolm and Helmut Lammer. The Astrobiology Habitability Primer. Astrobiology. 10/1, 2010. An introduction to a special issue to survey the European Space Agency’s Cosmic Vision Program for the years 2015 – 2025. Ten papers consider the gamut of “the search for worlds like our own; origin and formation of planetary systems; dynamical habitability of planetary systems; geophysical and atmospheric evolution of habitable planets; origin and evolution of life on terrestrial planets; co-evolution of atmospheres, life, and climate; deciphering spectral fingerprints of habitable exoplanets; stellar aspects of habitability—characterizing target stars for terrestrial planet-finding missions; a roadmap for the detection and characterization of other Earths; and the far future of exoplanet direct characterization (see below).” Many entries have multiple authors, some over 20, as Earthkind altogether commences to awaken to its nebulae neighborhood.

Gargaud, Muriel, et al. Young Sun, Early Earth and the Origins of Life. Berlin: Springer, 2013. As a genesis universe proceeds to quantify, describe, and witness itself, astro- physicists, chemists, and biologists altogether offer a visual retrospective, just now possible, of how an orbiting bioplanet with profuse, evolving life came to be. Some Salient aspects can then be noted. Throughout the tacit assumption is an innately conducive physical and chemical substrate. So put, it is the prior activity of an intrinsic self-organizing dynamics that serves to impel and form this embyronic emergence. The scientist authors are from France, and seem to prefer this vital persuasion. In an Epilogue, a contrast from the 1990s is cited between Nobel laureates Jacques Monod and Christian de Duve as to Chance or “Cosmic Necessity.” As is known, Monod decries that all is accident in sterile space, while de Duve professes a universe that must be pregnant with life and our phenomenal presence. But from the 2010s it is said that new complexity theories and worldwide evidence add much support an expectant organic procreation. As a consequence, in this stellar scenario our precious Earth ought to be appreciated for a unique, auspicious significance.

As a result of self-organization processes whose details have yet to be worked out, and which were as much chemical as physical in nature, the very first living beings, capable of transforming energy and matter, and of evolving, appeared. (Abstract for The Gestation of Life and its First Steps)

In the universe, there is one particular galaxy, among billions of others ... In that galaxy, there is one Sun, among 200 billion others ... And around that Sun, a small, blue, “Goldilocks” planet, which is neither too hot, nor too cold, that today shelters an incalculable number of living beings. This living planet, the Earth, seems unique in the universe because it is ours. What about the other places in our Solar System, such as planets and their satellites? Do they show any sign of life? And, farther away, what about planetary systems around other stars? Do they exist, and if so, do they harbor planets that could be living worlds, at least based on what we have learned about the Earth in the preceding chapters of this book, in other words “life as we know it? (Abstract for Other Planets, Other Living Worlds?)

Gargaud, Muriel, et al, eds. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Berlin: Springer, 2011. A 1897 page volume, much from French and European sources but with a worldwide array of authoritative contributors for 2,793 entries from Abiogenesis to Zircon. But with no entry for Cosmos, Universe, Nature, Philosophy, and so on, it remains an alphabetic, dictionary collection of disconnected objects and items, sans any organizing system, with no thought about or imagination of whether an encompassing organic, life-bearing genesis reality is being implied, waiting upon our discovery. Nobel chemist Christian de Duve does allude in a brief introduction, from which the quotes, but that is the extent.

A conclusion that emerges from this consideration is that life, as a product of environmentally enforced chemistry, was bound to arise under the physical-chemical conditions that prevailed at the site of its birth. This statement, at least, holds true for the early steps in the origin of life, until the appearance of the first replicable substance, most likely RNA. Once this happened, “selection” became added to chemistry, introducing an element of chance in the development of life. Contrary to what has often been claimed in the past, this fact does not necessarily imply that the process was ruled by contingency. There are reasons to believe that, in many instances, chance provided enough opportunities for selection to be optimizing, and, therefore, likewise obligatory under prevailing conditions.

Thus, in so far as chemistry and optimizing selection played a dominant role in the process, the development of life appears as the obligatory outcome of prevailing conditions. Hence the assumption that the probability of the appearance elsewhere in the universe of forms of life resembling Earth life in their basic properties is approximately equal to the probability of the occurrence elsewhere in the universe of the physical conditions that obtained at the site where Earth life arose. (Christian de Duve)

Gargaud, Muriel, et al, eds. Origins and Evolution of Life: An Astrobiological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. In a galactic and solar habitable zone, a very special bioplanet evolves, learns and stirs to collaborative retrospection. As the Table of Contents excerpt conveys, an international cadre courses through various cosmic occasions and domains of viable, sentient systems. Whenever might an earthwide natural philosophy be able to realize that an innately organic universe abides on its own, pregnant with planets, embryogenies and persons?

Part I. What Is Life? 1. Problems raised by a definition of life. M. Morange. 2. Some remarks about uses of cosmological anthropic 'principles' D. Lambert. 3. Minimal cell: the biologist point of view. C. Brochier-Armanet. 4. Minimal cell: the computer scientist point of view. H. Bersini. 5. Origins of life: computing and simulation approaches. B. Billoud. Part II. Astronomical and Geophysical Context of the Emergence of Life. 6. Organic molecules in interstellar medium. C. Ceccarelli and C. Cernicharo. 7. Cosmochemical evolution and the origin of life. S. Pizzarello. 8. Astronomical constraints on the emergence of life. M. Gounelle and T. Montmerle. 9. Formation of habitable planets. J. Chambers. 10. The concept of galactic habitable zone. N. Prantzos. 11. The young Sun and its influence on planetary atmospheres. M. Güdel and J. Kasting. 12. Climates of the Earth. G. Ramstein. Part IV. From Non-Living Systems to Life: 16. Energetic constraints on prebiotic pathways. R. Pascal and L. Boiteau. 17. Comparative genomics and early cell evolution. A. Lazcano. 18. Origin and evolution of metabolisms. J. Peretó. Part V. Mechanisms for Life Evolution. 21. The Role of symbiosis in eukaryotic evolution. A. Latorre, et al.

Genta, Giancarlo. Lonely Minds in the Universe. New York: Copernicus Books, 2007. A University professor at the Polytechnic of Torino surveys the likely cosmic occurrence of intelligent, human-like beings across a wide spectrum from world religious opinion to a possibilities of a Galactic Internet.

Gleiser, Marcello. From Cosmos to Intelligent Life: The Four Ages of Astrobiology. International Journal of Astrobiology. Online July, 2012. The Dartmouth astronomer details an episodic continuum from universe to us which traverses physical, chemical, biological, and cognitive stages. Within a multiverse milieu, “our Universe is one of infinitely many cosmoids that constantly bubble forth from a timeless realm.” Yet it is of interest to contrast the quotes. In Gleiser’s 2010 book, life is argued to be quite alien in an “imperfect universe.” While page 3 alludes to “matter’s urge” toward vitality, on page 5 it is yet cast as unintended and accidental. Surely this is the question that needs to be faced, and answered.

If we adopt the working definition of life as a self-sustaining network of chemical reactions capable of exchanging energy with the environment and of Darwinian reproduction, prebiotic chemistry addresses the emergence of such a network of reactions. In a general sense, chemistry describes matter's urge to bond in an attempt to decrease asymmetries in atomic and molecular electric charge distributions. Life is a very complex manifestation of this urge, an imbalance that recreates itself: it is not matter, but a process that happens to matter. (3)

Since it is difficult to imagine how intelligence{here or anywhere else{could have emerged without millions of years of evolving multicellular creatures, the discovery of multicellular aliens would be a great boost to the possibility that there are other smart creatures out there. Even so, it is important to keep in mind that human intelligence appeared as a by-product of random cosmic and evolutionary accidents: intelligence is not the end-goal of evolution, as one hundred and fifty million years of dinosaurs demonstrate. (5)

Gomez de Castro, Ana. Is Life an Unavoidable Consequence of the Formation of the Universe? Investigating the Formation of Bio-Precursors and the Signature of Earth-Like Living Forms. Frontiers of Astronomy and Space Science. Online August, 2018. A Complutense University of Madrid, AEGORA Research Group biomathematician describes and contributes to future explorations of living systems across the cosmos. Some topical sections are ultraviolet astronomy, missing metals problem, and Earth’s UV signature.

This contribution to the Research Topic “Imagining the Future of Astronomy and Space Sciences” focuses on astrobiology and exoplanetary research. Understanding the origin of life is the main scientific challenge to this century and an interdisciplinary endeavor in itself. To that astronomy will contribute in three key issues. Firstly, by measuring the abundance of elements relevant to life in the Universe. Then by determining the preferred location for aminoacids and complex organic molecules assembly. Finally, by investigating the signatures of life in exoplanets. A new generation of facilities will need to be built to address these questions. The relevance of ultraviolet instrumentation for this purpose is highlighted in this short perspective.

Gomez-Marquez, Jamie. What is Life? Molecular Biology Reports. July, 2021. In this Springer journal, we cite an essay by a senior University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain biochemist because it provides an integral composite view of the distinctive qualities of living, evolving, regnant systems. See also Lithbea, A New Domain Outside the Tree of Life by J G-M at Preprints. for June 7, 2022.

Thus, I define life as a process that takes place in highly organized organic structures and is characterized by being preprogrammed, interactive, adaptative and evolutionary. If life is the process, living beings are the system in which this process takes place. I also wonder whether viruses can be considered living things or not. Finally, I argue that if there were life elsewhere in the universe, it would be very similar to what we know on this planet because the laws of physics and the composition of matter are universal and because of the principle of the inexorability of life. (Excerpt)

Since any definition of life must connect with what we observe in nature, my strategy for finding a definition of life was to establish what are the key attributes or traits common to all living things. What do bacteria, yeasts, lichens, trees, beetles, birds, whales, etc. have in common that clearly differentiates them from non-living systems? In my opinion, living organisms share seven traits: organic nature, high degree of organization, pre-programming, interaction (or collaboration), adaptation, reproduction and evolution, the last two being facultative as they are not present in all living beings. (1-2)

Guelin, Michel and Jose Cernicharo. Organic Molecules in Interstellar Space: Latest Advances. arXiv:2201.06106. IRAM, St. Martin d’Heres, France and Instituto de Fisica, CSIC, Spain astrobiologists describe these complex compositions, along the instrumentation used to find and assay them. A wide variety of ecosmic gases detected by the ESA Rosetta satellite are also illustrated. The bricks essential for the construction of amino acids and the nucleobases seem therefore widespread across the Universe.

Although first considered as too diluted for the formation of molecules in-situ and too harsh for their survival, the interstellar medium has turned out to ba rich palette of molecular species with 256 prebiotic kinds identified. The basic ingredients found in the Miller-Urey flask appeared early after the first galaxies and are widespread throughout the Universe. The chemical composition of the gas in distant galaxies seems not much different from that in the nearby interstellar clouds. (Abstract flavor)

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