Modelling precursors to life
"What I cannot create, I do not understand" are the final words written by Richard Feynman on his blackboard. While this statement can certainly be applied to many fields, employing it in one of the subfields of astrobiology - the Origins of Life (OoL), is nearly impossible. The truth is that nobody knows how life originated, and no one has created life entirely from scratch. There are, however, many hypotheses on life's origin.
Some say that life started in hydrothermal vents, which provide perfect conditions for complex chemistry to emerge. Others point towards clays, highlighting the importance of their catalytic abilities in the formation of complex organic compounds. Meanwhile, another group supports the panspermia hypothesis, which argues that life was brought to Earth by foreign bodies like comets or asteroids.
These differing suppositions raise the question: "Why is it so hard to study the OoL?". There are multiple reasons for that. Firstly, the OoL occurred billions of years ago in Earth's early history. It is not entirely understood what the atmosphere's composition, temperature, availability of water, and energy sources were at that time. Secondly, there is no direct evidence of early life. The oldest documented fossils date back approximately 3.7 billion years, but life probably existed before. Finally, we can't be sure that the traces of early life can still be found in present-day organisms. Early evolutionary processes may have eliminated traces of the initial steps that gave rise to life, resulting in only the modern descendants remaining. Because of so many uncertainties surrounding the OoL, we believe a more agnostic study approach is required.
To this end, our project aims to create a geodynamic simulation of 4.5 billion years of an Earth-like planet's life. We want the simulation to be as detailed as possible, incorporating elemental circulation, surface processes, and climate. We then want to use this model to understand where and under what conditions life could have emerged. This more general approach will allow us to reduce the search space for possible OoL scenarios, bringing us closer to solving the mystery of life's origin.
Contact information
Anna Lewkowicz