Astronomical Origins of Life

B. Hoyle, N.C. Wickramasinghe

ISBN 10: 0792360818 / ISBN 13: 9780792360810

Published by Springer, NL, 2000

About this Item

Living material contains about twenty different sorts of atom combined into a set of relatively simple molecules. Astrobiologists tend to believe that abiotic mater­ ial will give rise to life in any place where these molecules exist in appreciable abundances and where physical conditions approximate to those occurring here on Earth. We think this popular view is wrong, for it is not the existence of the building blocks of life that is crucial but the exceedingly complicated structures in which they are arranged in living forms. The probability of arriving at biologically significant arrangements is so very small that only by calling on the resources of the whole universe does there seem to be any possibility of life originating, a conclusion that requires life on the Earth to be a minute component of a universal system. Some think that the hugely improbable transition from non-living to living mat­ ter can be achieved by dividing the transition into many small steps, calling on a so-called 'evolutionary' process to bridge the small steps one by one. This claim turns on semantic arguments which seek to replace the probability for the whole chain by the sum of the individual probabilities of the many steps, instead of by their product. This is an error well known to those bookies who are accustomed to taking bets on the stacking of horse races. But we did not begin our investigation from this point of view. Reprinted from ASTROPHYSICS AND SPACE SCIENCE, 268:1-3.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780792360810

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Astronomical Origins of Life
• Publisher: Springer, NL
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792360818
• ISBN 13: 9780792360810
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 16.51W x 1.91H x 24.13D centimeters 16.51 centimeters width by 1.91 centimeters height by 24.13 centimeters depth

About this title

Synopsis

Living material contains about twenty different sorts of atom combined into a set of relatively simple molecules. Astrobiologists tend to believe that abiotic mater­ ial will give rise to life in any place where these molecules exist in appreciable abundances and where physical conditions approximate to those occurring here on Earth. We think this popular view is wrong, for it is not the existence of the building blocks of life that is crucial but the exceedingly complicated structures in which they are arranged in living forms. The probability of arriving at biologically significant arrangements is so very small that only by calling on the resources of the whole universe does there seem to be any possibility of life originating, a conclusion that requires life on the Earth to be a minute component of a universal system. Some think that the hugely improbable transition from non-living to living mat­ ter can be achieved by dividing the transition into many small steps, calling on a so-called 'evolutionary' process to bridge the small steps one by one. This claim turns on semantic arguments which seek to replace the probability for the whole chain by the sum of the individual probabilities of the many steps, instead of by their product. This is an error well known to those bookies who are accustomed to taking bets on the stacking of horse races. But we did not begin our investigation from this point of view.

Synopsis

Two of the pioneers of the modern version of panspermia - the theory that comets disperse microbial life throughout the cosmos - trace the development of their ideas through a sequence of key papers. A logical progression of thought is shown to lead up to the currently accepted viewpoint that at least the biochemical building blocks of life must have derived from comets. The authors go further, however, to argue that not just the chemicals of life, but fully-fledged microbial cells have an origin that is external to the Earth. Such a theory of cosmic life, once established, would have profound scientific as well as sociological implications. The publication of this book is all the more timely now that we are on the threshold of verifying many of these ideas by direct space exploration of planets and comets.