The Origins of Life

The Origins of Life
The "I AM" - the SELF SELF-REALIZATION
and the puzzling and funny (or not so fanny)
desire to RE-PRODUCE itself
is the pattern
from which all things come.
I define life as imperfect replication.
That's it.
Life.
And what that means is that the entity can make copies of itself
but not exact copies.
A perfectly replicating system isn't alive because it doesn't evolve.
Quartz crystals make exact copies of themselves! and have done so from the beginning of the earth.
They don't evolve, because they're locked into that particular form.
But with imperfect replication, you get mutants that develop some sort of selective advantage
that will allow them to dominate the system.
That whole system then evolves, and you get this cascade of evolution progressing to more complicated entities.
But something preceded all that, something that could do this basic thing of replication and mutation.
What is known about the first living organism (FLO), is that for it to have happened at all, it needs to overcome the universe's most prohibitive law, - the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that all matter tends toward entropy, the dissipation of energy.
All life is in utter defiance of that law, abound, brief energy-gathering stay against entropy!
The other essential requirement for the kind of imperfect replication system is that there had to have been some biochemical MESSAGE or cod - a FIRST BIT of INFORMATION to begin to convey.
Or, rather, to balance the "misconvey", where the initial utterance, the one that preceded all others, was increasingly transmuted and reinvented billions of times on its way.
It is the precise nature of that first utterance that astrobiologists are trying to decipher.
There is a doubt whether the simple kind of replicators qualifies as life. Could it be that even the simple catalytic self-sustaining reactions, that occur on mineral surfaces, are the first types of living systems, without even the requirement for genetic information?
How to define what is chemistry and what is life? Or, it's life as we don't know it. (based on a Freyja/Carolina - astrobiologist Jeffrey Bada)
Love to all,
Leo