Future Foundation Assoc., Egedal 21, 2690, Karlslunde, Denmark.
Theory Biosci. 2022 Sep;141(3):279-295. doi: 10.1007/s12064-022-00373-x. Epub 2022 Jul 30.
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.
在宇宙的其他地方寻找生命不仅代表了我们对生命知识的潜在扩展，也澄清了适用于地球生命的基本原则，从而限制了对外星生命的搜索。尽管没有确切的数字表明在地球的整个历史中存在过多少物种，但我们仍然可以通过钟形曲线推断生命的分布方式。这张图显示了从生命起源到生命终结的全部生命。包含生命的系统包含了一系列被指定为最小复杂性和适应性可能性的第一原则，适应性的围栏，以及右偏扩展。在对生命的讨论中，将构建一个框架，该框架将基于嗜中生物和极端生物之间的动态关系，强加于外星世界，以利用该图的预测能力来分析外星生命可能如何展开。在这个框架中，进化变化不取决于所涉及的特定生物化学。一旦生命“启动并运行”，构成地球生命和外星生命的各种生物化学系统将具有次要意义。极端生物的尾巴代表了一个范围扩展，其中测试并占据了所有的栖息地可能性。这个尾巴向右移动不是因为生物体的生物化学构成，而是因为它别无选择。因此，可以预测地球生命和外星生命的图表在总体上会相似。可以做出许多其他预测；例如，对于大气不平衡接近平衡的世界，可以预测生命可能仍然存在，因为极端生物的范围扩展越来越向右延伸。由于生命必然出现在最小复杂性的左墙上，因此可以预测任何细胞生命的起源都将与地球的第一种生命具有密切的结构相似性。因此，从原则上讲，生命可能已经在地球上多次起源，并且仍然存在。还可以预测，在我们看不到的其他领域中可能存在一个完整的生命子集，因为从抽象意义上讲，我们处于图表之内。如果我们从整体上看图表，这个子集看起来非常像一个巨大的生命超域。
