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Origin of Life

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Life in the Universe

Part of the book series: Springer Praxis Books ((ASTRONOMY))

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Abstract

The origin of life is a large and active field of research, and one chapter in this book can hardly do it justice. Yet, if we are to make reasonable inferences about the probability of life on other worlds, we must be able to gauge the possibility that living systems could have arisen (or arrived) there in the first place. And that, in turn, depends on our understanding of what the possibilities are for the origin of life anywhere. In an effort to rescue those possibilities from the realm of total speculation, we consider first what we know or infer about the origin of life on Earth, hoping that this singular example can provide some insights into and boundaries upon our thinking about the generic origins of life, wherever they have occurred. Then we use our limited understanding of what may have happened at the dawn of life on Earth, in combination with our definition of life given in Chap. 2, to focus on inferences with regard to the first cellular membranes, the first metabolisms, and the first replication mechanisms. Finally, we will discuss the implications of these insights for the predictability of life elsewhere in the Universe.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Dirk Schulze-Makuch

  2. University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA

    Louis N. Irwin

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Schulze-Makuch, D., Irwin, L.N. (2018). Origin of Life. In: Life in the Universe. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97658-7_3

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