The first fragile life-molecules

I wonder whether the OOL experts in this group would care to comment
on a speculation of mine. This is that the very first molecule capable
of self-generation would have been vulnerable to thermal buffeting
from the moment of formation. In any environment on earth I cannot see
how it would not be torn apart within a nanosecond.

It seems to me therefore that the first molecule must have formed in
space. There, relatively free from gross mechanical disruption it
would have the time to bulk itself upwards by adding further chemical
groups preparatory to the possibility of division into two copies of
its former self. If -- as seems likely to me -- there were many such
original self-generative molecules created in space then any which
approached more hostile chemical surroundings in the upper atmospheres
of bodies such as earth would have been ruthlessly selected in order
to survive. Furthermore, any of those which were able to survive must
have been able to acquire repair mechanisms and, perhaps later, outer
defences.

Thus, as I see it, life must have been created in outer space but
could only be selected for longer-term survival in an environment with
only the lowest levels of chemical attack. (I am assuming that such
molecules would have been able to survive energy attacks in outer
space or that sufficient numbers would have been created for random
survival.) In this way, such regenerative molecules could have been
selected to survive in the highest levels of the atmosphere and then
gradually, by selection, descend to increasingly active chemical
regimes. By then I would assume that such surviving molecules would
have developed "advanced" procedures of chemical absorption, repair
and defence.

By living in outer space initially, molecules have time and relative
chemico-mechanical safety to gradually develop the faculties of
chemical absorption, regeneration, repair and defence. Whether a few
or a large number of different lifeforms would have survived by the
time they impinged in the much more hostile environment of the upper
atmosphere is something I would not care to guess at. But, presumably,
such molecules would also have added the faculty of producing
mutations (or perhaps this was built in from the beginning), so that
at one and the same time, as molecules penetrated lower levels of the
atmosphere, radiation of potential successors was going on as well as
culling.

What does this mean for those who seek to investigate origins? It
seems to be that instead of looking for precise environmental
conditions on the earth's surface (or near it) we can generalise the
whole situation to astronomical numbers of possibilities. We need not
pay so much attention to the energetics of chemical reactions (because
energy would be available everywhere) but to the spatial
configurations and subsequent stabilities involved when a variety of
simple chemical compounds are joined with one another. It is, of
course, the spatial configurations of chemicals in the living cell
which is the fundamental factor in all its functions. We know that
large numbers of such chemical groups exist in outer space. Joining
them together in spatial-mechanical fashion (taking atomic valencies
into account, of course) has never been attempted but a start may be
possible given today's supercomputers. I think we'd find that an
almost infinite number of initial possibilities could emerge in due
course.

We know that pharmaceutical companies have taken to computer-produced
spatial configuration as a way to find new drugs of great molecular
complexity with specific functions and ultimately find a few
possibilities. Perhaps OOL investigators ought to adopt the same
method at the other end of molecular complexity though, I suggest,
they would find huge numbers of initial possibilities.

Keith Hudson


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Relevant Pages

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