At what point does inanimate nature become alive? When does the moment come when life emerges from the atoms of matter?

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5 Answers

  1. Since we are all carbon-based lifeforms, it all started when the chemical element carbon was formed on earth. It has the property of twisting, its special position of atoms allows you to create chains while preserving and creating information about previous twists.

  2. There is no such moment. Everything that exists lives. Science, like other spheres of human activity, is anthropocentric. If you define life, then it must necessarily be at least a little, but be similar to the life of a person. But in fact, only 2 things are enough for life:

    Subjectivity (the presence of one's own will) and interaction with other forms of life.

    So, for example, to prove the presence of will in an atom or molecule is an unsolvable practical task today, but their interaction with other atoms, molecules, and particles has been proven for a long time. Therefore, the problem rests on the interpretation of actions that occur with what is commonly called inorganic substances. The scientific solution to this question is interesting, but incomplete. It is postulated that there was an impulse that set everything in motion. The incompleteness of the thesis is that it does not explain why this impulse occurred. By answering one question, it generates another. The causal relationship does not begin here at the beginning, but in some indefinite place. On the contrary, if we say that matter initially has motion (and life), then all contradictions are removed and the model takes on a complete form.

  3. I immediately apologize to the chemists and biologists if something is wrong.

    Retelling the history of approaches to the question of the origin of life and listing theories will take up too much space, since this is a really huge topic. Modern science generally agrees that the key role in the origin of life is played by such a phenomenon as self – organization in nonequilibrium conditions-the emergence of organized structures from randomly interacting components of an open system with a constant influx of energy from outside. One of the first to formulate this concept was the physicist Ilya Prigozhin, who called such conditions dissipative structures.

    For the emergence of life, such manifestations of self – organization as autocatalysis (a molecule of a substance catalyzes a reaction that, among other things, produces a catalyst itself) and self-assembly are especially important- when molecules under certain conditions form organized structures, for example, lipid shells due to the hydrophobic and hydrophilic properties of the structure of a lipid molecule. Acting together, these two phenomena can serve as the basis for the appearance of “protolife”: autocatalysis provides reproduction, and self-assembly-the border with the external environment. Only the right conditions are needed with the right chemicals at hand. And judging by the very recent very cool discovery of John Sutherland and the team elementy.ru – such conditions are quite real.

    It should be noted that the appearance of life is not an accident, as was commonly believed in classical theories (the so-called hopeful monster), but rather a pattern under certain conditions.

  4. Here you can list the “school” signs of life (growth, reproduction, metabolism…). It seems to me that the scientific community, having ranked viruses as living nature, decided that one sign is enough — the ability to reproduce. There is an opportunity to make a more or less reliable copy of yourself-living nature, no-not alive.

  5. An important feature of living matter is a sharp difference from the environment. For example, we are warm-blooded, warmer than the average temperature around us. Worms move, plants grow, etc. and of course absorption, excretion, and reproduction. And maybe the most important difference is that everyone has DNA. Inanimate nature becomes alive when it begins to copy itself by reproduction.

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