Abstract
Terrestrial life emerged in a murky and violent period of history that has left little trace of its existence. Astrobiologists have been left to infer its likely origins from what meager and indirect evidence nature has left for us to decipher. We know, for example, that one of the building blocks of cells—a group of chemicals called amino acids—are found in the nebulae from which planets condense. Amino acids are also ubiquitous in a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites. These observations imply that they could have been delivered to Earth very early in its history, but it does not say that they were.
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Notes
- 1.
This is discussed in more detail in the author’s Springer book, Granite Skyscrapers.
- 2.
Although it looks complex, calculating the entropy for a system is quite easy. S = −kΣpilnp is a simple equation that defines a version of entropy known as the Gibbs entropy. “Σ” is the sum of all the possible states, or microstates, the particles in the system can be in; “p” represents their probability and “in” is the natural log; “k” is the Boltzmann constant. Shannon entropy is a modified version of this equation, which relates to information. We’ll make something of a big deal of Shannon entropy in Chaps. 7, 8 and 9.
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Stevenson, D.S. (2019). The Origin and Early Evolution of Life. In: Red Dwarfs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25550-3_6
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