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What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

quantamagazine.org

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Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#41

Post by nilkn »

It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble into more complex compounds like magnetic Lego blocks, which ...

I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time. In this view, the Earth is roughly a ~10^38 ops/sec dissipative self-modifying search engine, of which life captures roughly ~10^35 ops/sec into metabolism, heredity, ecological competition, and evolutionary search. Once proper biological evolution kicked in, with some bumps along the road, it has had a general tendency to reallocate that immense compute capacity in a way that increases search adaptivity per joule by finding and stacking "search accelerators" (prebiotic geochemistry/biochemistry, replicators, cells, DNA/RNA/protein systems, mitochondria, sexual reproduction, multicellularity, nervous systems, intelligence / brains, language / culture, science / technology, ?).

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#42

Post by scheme271 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #20
buildsjets wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "circular bit of road" is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the second highest-powered particle accelerator on the planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collide...

Awesome! I had a good nose about the LHC when I was there a few years ago. I'm guessing that site isn't quite so enthusiastic about visitors? The dump load for one of my wind turbines is a pair of 22Ω resistors recovered from one of CERN's "free for all" scrap piles :-)

Brookhaven does classified research and access to the site is pretty restricted. The last time I visited there were guards with assault rifles at the gates. In comparison, Fermilab used to (and may still) let you walk onto the campus and wander about.

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#43

Post by lazide »

nilkn wrote: post #41

It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble i…

The Buddha nods.

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#44

Post by culi »

buildsjets wrote: post #4

Reminds me of the Gamma Forest at Brookhaven National Labs. From 1961 thru 1978 they irradiated a section of the pine barrens forest with a cesium-137 source just to see what would happen. It sterilized the soil and hardly anything grows there, almost 50 years later. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pJYr6qiZnMdVwLJS6 https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s

That 1967 documentary highlights lichen and clumps of grass growing there. I imagine the soil ecology has been devastated and failed to regenerate which is why larger plants like trees haven't been able to return

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#45

Post by culi »

greenbit wrote: post #10

This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.

The leading theories for the origins of chemical evolution (abiogenesis) actually focus on deep-sea hydrothermal, alkaline vents

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#47

Post by cyberax »

adrian_b wrote: post #39
cyberax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life can even use something other than amino acids. They are really inconvenient when you think about it. Fixed nitrogen is extremely rare, and there are no nitrogen-containing minerals other than some exotic exceptions. Amino acids are useful because they can be easily joined together and split apart (via the C-N bond). But there are other types of "molecular glues" that are viable, like sulfur or phosphorus.

Amino acids are much more likely to be involved in the appearance of life anywhere than other molecules. For instance it would be much less surprising if an alien life form used another kind of polymer to store information, instead of nucleic acids, than if it would not use amino acids. The fact that on Earth the living beings eventually used ATP and RNA appears to have been determined in great part by chance, while…

> The fact that on Earth the living beings eventually used ATP and RNA appears to have been determined in great part by chance, while the use of amino acids seems to have been much more deterministic.

It looks like on Earth the RNA was the initial replicant. RNA can be folded into complex shapes and can have catalytic properties in itself. Ribosomes that assemble proteins have RNA at the active site with proteins only providing structural framework.

That's why amino acids might not end up being so universal.

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#48

Post by buildsjets »

scheme271 wrote: post #42
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome! I had a good nose about the LHC when I was there a few years ago. I'm guessing that site isn't quite so enthusiastic about visitors? The dump load for one of my wind turbines is a pair of 22Ω resistors recovered from one of CERN's "free for all" scrap piles :-)

Brookhaven does classified research and access to the site is pretty restricted. The last time I visited there were guards with assault rifles at the gates. In comparison, Fermilab used to (and may still) let you walk onto the campus and wander about.

It's a Department of Energy facility. The primary purpose of the DOE is to further the development of nuclear weapons.

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#49

Post by AareyBaba »

nilkn wrote: post #41

It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble i…

Yet, there is only one form of life on earth exhibiting cellular metabolism and DNA/RNA replication. That original life form formed as soon as the earth became suitable for life. In the 3+ billion years since, there has been no new life form created that we know of despite the ongoing unfathomable computations.

Re: What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

#50

Post by customguy »

nilkn wrote: post #41

It's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble i…

Search for what though? On the face of it, life might also just be some eddies in the stream of energy flowing downhill, so to speak.
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