Sketching E.T. With The Fundamental Logic Of Life

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Extraterrestrial and artificial life have long captivated the human mind.

A new paper identifies certain fundamental limits to life. (image: Ernst Haeckel’s Radiolaria (1862) via Public Domain Review)

“Imagine that a space probe lands on a distant planet. The probe has sophisticated instruments that detect life on different scales. These instruments might detect a network structure of chemical reactions in the atmosphere or identify molecular biosignatures consistent with living systems. The probe can also scan its surroundings, capturing morphological biosignatures and other instruments might analyse the chemical network of the atmosphere and measure its topological and molecular complexity.

How different would such an alternative biosphere be?

How dependent would an alternative life form be on the environmental context?

Are there physical or chemical pre-conditions required for life to emerge?

These questions can be extended beyond evolutionary biology and astrobiology and affect our potential to design (using synthetic biology and bioengineering) novel life forms,” researchers write in their paper.

Knowing only the building blocks of our own biosphere, can we predict how life may exist on other planets? What factors will rein in the Frankensteinian life forms we hope to build in laboratories here on Earth?

A paper in Interface Focus co-authored by several SFI researchers takes these questions out of the realm of science fiction and into scientific laws.

Reviewing case studies from thermodynamics, computation, genetics, cellular development, brain science, ecology, and evolution, the paper concludes that certain fundamental limits prevent some forms of life from ever existing.

Requirements include entropy reduction (which includes, for instance, the ability to heal and repair), closed-compartment cells as the inevitable units of life, and a system — such as brains — that integrates information and makes decisions using neuron-like units.

The authors point to historical examples where people predicted some complex feature of life that biologists later confirmed.

Examples include the Schrodinger view of information molecules as “aperiodic crystals,” or mid-century simulations predicting that parasites are inevitable when complex life evolves.

That such correct predictions were possible with almost no available evidence suggests all living systems follow an underlying universal logic.

Read the paper.

Source

Written by Eddie Gonzales  Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer