#168 – Life from non-life?

Deep ocean hydrothermal vents may have been the stage for the biggest play on earth, preprogrammed into the Big Bang: the origin of life!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the fine-tuning of the universe to produce life … complex, intelligent life.  This week and next, we’re going to look at how it seems that the appearance of life was baked into that fine-tuning.  That the moment the universe had presented a platform or stage, life appeared almost immediately on that stage, and just as quickly began to complexify, as if it were all preprogrammed.

We talked to Dr. Freeland, who studied at Oxford, York, and Cambridge Universities, did his post-doc at Princeton University, and spent four years as project manager for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, leading a team of astrophysicists, astrochemists and astrobiologists, all focusing their efforts on trying to understand the origin of life.

We began with the fact that it took roughly 10 billion years to create Earth itself, but then only half a billion years for life to appear and spread across that newly formed Earth to such a degree that it left fossil evidence that we can now read several billion years later.  (Earlier this week, it was in the news that the same may have been found on Mars!)

Next, we talked about the conditions on Earth that seemed to be so permitting for life: there was almost no oxygen, no land, and relatively few free minerals!  But two key ingredients that were present was tectonic activity and hydrothermal vents on the ocean surface.  Those vents began spewing out minerals, heat, and acidity, which in turn began to create oxygen, electricity, and complex macromolecules.  All of those together led to the appearance of life!  And that early life began complexifying.  One of the things that living organisms did was replicate the conditions around those hydrothermal vents: they learned how to use complex lipid membranes and inorganic metals to set up gradients of acidity and electricity, and use those to then generate energy molecules (we now call these mitochondria).  At the same time, they were creating genetic information, and setting up metabolic and synthetic networks.  And they started freely sharing that genetic information, passing it around through horizontal gene transfer (neighbor-to-neighbor transmission, in contrast to the more familiar parent-to-child transmission).

This may be the first step toward solving a few of the biggest questions in origin of life research: how did life originate … was it genes/reproduction first, or metabolism/energy production first, or lipid membranes first.  The answer that Dr. Freeland posits: minerals alone were creating complex macromolecules first, and life then replicated what the minerals were already doing (some listeners might here recall an often used analogy of the wooden scaffolding needed to produce stone archways).  For the past few decades, people have been talking about the RNA World that preceded our own DNA World; but both were preceded by the Mineral World!

Putting all of this together with the past three episodes, what we get is a Big Bang that seemed to be finely-tuned to produce stars, planets, atomic elements, and the periodic table, which in turn followed their own built-in rules and properties to create complex macromolecules and even more complex bundles of amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids (‘prebiotic entities’, loosely comparable to what we now call viruses), which eventually combined to produce what we would now call ‘life’. 

We ended with what all of this has to say about any possible meaning and purpose of the universe!

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Stephen Freeland at his current institutional faculty page and his web-page at NASA.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #66, in which we talked to Dr. Freeland three years ago, or the many other episodes we’ve released on the subject of Fine Tuning.

Episode image is once again thanks to Andrew.

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