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First principles of terrestrial life: exemplars for potential extra-terrestrial biology

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Abstract

The search for life elsewhere in the universe represents not only a potential expansion of our knowledge regarding life, but also a clarification of the first principles applicable to terrestrial life, which thus restrict the very search for extra-terrestrial life. Although there are no exact figures for how many species have existed throughout Earth's total history, we can still make inferences about how the distribution of this life has proceeded through a bell curve. This graph shows the totality of life, from its origin to its end. The system enclosing life contains a number of first principles designated the walls of minimal complexity and adaptive possibility, the fence of adaptation, and right-skewed extension. In this discussion of life, a framework will be formulated that, based on the dynamic relationship between mesophiles and extremophiles, will be imposed on exoworlds in order to utilize the graph's predictive power to analyze how extra-terrestrial life could unfold. In this framework the evolutionary variation does not depend on the specific biochemistry involved. Once life is ‘up and running,’ the various biochemical systems that can constitute terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life will have secondary significance. The extremophilic tail represents a range expansion in which all habitat possibilities are tested and occupied. This tail moves to the right not because of the biochemistry constitutions of organisms, but because it can do nothing else. Thus, it can be predicted that graphs of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life will be similar overall. A number of other predictions can be made; for example, for worlds in which the atmospheric disequilibrium is approaching equilibrium, it is predicted that life may still be present because the extremophilic range expansion is stretched increasingly farther to the right. Because life necessarily arises at a left wall of minimal complexity, it is predicted that any origin of cellular life will have a close structural resemblance to that of the first terrestrial life. Thus, in principle, life may have originated more than once on Earth, and still exist. It is also predicted that there may be an entire subset of life existing among other domains that we do not see because, in an abstract sense, we are inside the graph. If we view the graph in its entirety, this subset appears very much like a vast supra-domain of life.

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Fig. 1

Credits: partially adapted from Gould (1996)

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Notes

  1. Gould’s original graph focused mainly on bacteria. However, archaea are now known to be a major part of the microbial biosphere and to thrive in a broad range of habitats [Baker et al., 2020]. Thus, when microbial life in the form of extremophiles and mesophiles is discussed here, both bacteria and archaea are included in the graph, although it is remembered that bacteria appear to have come first, and still constitute the majority of life between the two domains.

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    Ian von Hegner

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von Hegner, I. First principles of terrestrial life: exemplars for potential extra-terrestrial biology. Theory Biosci. 141, 279–295 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-022-00373-x

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