Life is absurdly complex, extremely specialized, and so far we haven’t found it anywhere
else.
So we must have just gotten really lucky right?
Well, maybe not.
Hello you lively bunch, Julian here for DNews.
There are a lot of ideas to explain the origin of life on earth.
There’s panspermia, the idea that life forms took a cosmic hitch-hike and crashed into
our blue dot 4 billion years ago.
There’s primordial soup, which hypothesizes that when you take ancient earth’s chemical
conditions and add a dash of lightning you can turn inorganic precursors into organic
compounds.
Sounds crazy but the Miller-Urey experiment of 1952 tested that and came up with over
20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
But now there’s been a new idea put forward that’s so simple, so elegant, and so novel
it might change everything we know about life and where it comes from.
Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, has proposed that life is something that matter just does
when exposed to an external energy source like the sun and surrounded by a heat bath
like the ocean.
it sounds like a cop out but there’s math behind it.
England’s hypothesis operates on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that as
time passes, the total entropy of a system increases until it reaches thermodynamic equilibrium.
That in english basically means that systems dissipate energy until it is equally distributed.
Entropy is often equated to chaos, but that isn’t quite right and saying that to scientists
will make them laugh at you.
At least that’s what Trace tells me.
Anyway when going by the “entropy = disorder” misconception life seems like it violates
this law of thermodynamics.
Living things are orderly and organized, though I can never seem to find my wallet.
But because living things dissipate energy in the form of heat, we’re actually adding
to the overall entropy of the universe and thus the second law is conserved.
According to England, atoms actually form organic molecules and eventually life because
it’s a naturally more efficient way to dissipate energy.
They have to be getting that energy from somewhere and be surrounded by a bath like an ocean
or atmosphere to dump heat in, but that’s exactly the conditions of this new place called
Earth.
This also supports why life reproduces; reproduction makes more compounds that dissipate more energy.
Therefore when natural selection is applied, successful life forms should waste as little
energy as possible reproducing but should still be above a theoretical minimum.
When England looked at E. coli in 2012, he found that the bacteria operated just above
this minimum floor of waste heat.
England’s math checks out, but whether or not it’s why life came to exist is still
up for debate.
Currently experiments are being formulated to test the hypothesis.
But even if it turns out to be a non-starter, England’s novel idea will tell us a lot
about a question we’ve been asking for millennia.
There are a lot of really interesting ideas on where life comes from and we still have
no conclusive scientific evidence for one or the other.
Anthony’s got a great bit on primordial soup in this video over here.
Alright guys I can already hear those fingers flying in the comment section so I’m sure
I don’t have to prompt you, but I will say this; we strive to be open minded and welcoming
here at DNews and we want our online community to be the same.
Stay civil, stay smart, and I’ll see you next time on DNews.