Exploring the Origins of Existence

Recently scientists confirmed the discovery of a super-Earth, located just 20 light-years away. It could be one of the closest and most promising exoplanets for studying conditions suitable for life.

The planet takes 647 days to orbit its star, placing it within the habitable zone — the region where liquid water might exist. Organic life, as we know it, needs water to emerge. Well, at least that is the basic assumption.

Now, what is life and how does life emerge? The stunning and surprising answer is that nobody knows. Despite thousands of years of research, we still do not know why life exists. It is like the very nature of life is too great a question for human reason to comprehend.

Life is built on completely improbable events. It cannot be explained. Thus, the question remains: what is life? In every tiny drop of water, an unimaginably large number of chemical reactions are constantly occurring. Many reactions take only a millionth of a billionth of a second. This means that events, which in everyday life just wouldn’t happen, happens in the world of molecules.

Probability theory shows that building blocks of up to eight amino acids, thought to be the minimum amount needed for a living organism to arise, could well arise spontaneously on any habitable planet. The theory is that evolution always produces an impressive and varied amount of flora and fauna, if the conditions are right.

Nor can it be ruled out that a supernatural intervention is part of the creation process. But that does not mean that the origin and development of life contradicts the laws of nature.

The main question is this: What is the catalyst that starts the whole life process?

Despite countless attempts by astrobiologists and other scientists to solve the mystery, they still have not provided a satisfactory answer. There are many assumptions, but they all come down to the same thing. They are ultimately just loose conclusions, which cannot be proven. This is, of course, frustrating. Despite all this research, man today essentially faces the same conundrum as his ancestors had. Where did the spark of life come from? The one that brought an organism to life.

Intelligent life is an even greater mystery. After several thousand years of research, the question of the origin of man is still unanswered. Traces of so-called ghosts have been found in human DNA – in the human genes. But these traces of unknown ancestors only complicates the theory of human origins. Scientists don’t know where these mystery populations came from or what had happened to them.

The conclusion is that the evolutionary history of the human species is more complex than previously thought.

Scientists have found remains of previously unknown ancestors, who lived in the western parts of the African continent on Earth. The finds are dated over half a million years back in time. This population was found to be genetically related to modern humans. Up to twenty percent of the genetic origins of modern humans are attributed to these mystery fathers.

DNA from another previously unknown ancestor was found when researchers analysed the genes of four West African populations. However, no physical evidence have been found for the very oldest human species – such as bones or ancient genes. There is no precise identity for this ancient group. That’s why, the term ‘ghost’ is used for them.

These unnamed ancestors are compared to Neanderthal and Denisovan humans. These two different human species had also interbred genetically with modern humans but later died out. Why they died out is still a mystery. Perhaps their contribution to evolution was that they passed on their best and strongest genes to another species. But this is of course just speculation. The most important questions are still unanswered.

Scientists admit that the emergence of life, that is, the emergence of the first cell, was almost a miracle. So many were the conditions that had to be met to get the whole thing started. Most scientists believe that the cell was the result of several hundred million years of evolution. But other prominent scientists doubt that chance could create something as complex as a cell, at least based on the conditions believed to exist on planets where organic life arise. Some scientists claim that everything originated from a limitless, qualityless matter, which then evolved into life. What is life? This question remains at the heart of scientific inquiry.

So, What Is Life and How Did It Start?

All peoples, all societies and all cultures had their view of the world and its origin. The strange thing is that in all descriptions of the very origin of life there is the mention of a kind of primordial condition, or a primordial foundation contrasted with the world that existed. From where this primordial condition or primordial origin originated no one could explain.

It is also common to almost all of these cosmologies that the emergence of the world from this primordial state was indeed seen as commanded by gods, but still as a natural process, a kind of birth. Some philosophers and also physicists later believed that this limitless and formless primordial condition is ever-present everywhere in the universe. It not only functions as a platform and foundation for the origin of the universe but it’s also an ever-existing part or side of our entire existence.

Science has not progressed further than that. Despite several thousand years of research and despite the fact that man had taken the first, big steps into the universe, the fundamental questions are still unanswered. What is life? How did life originate? And why? What is the point of it all?

Still, the biggest puzzle for astrobiology is how matter could become alive. The difference between the simplest microorganism and dead matter such as minerals, water and air, is the inherent life force that religious people sometimes take as proof that life cannot be described in scientific terms.

Scientists have a different view. Let it be that the innermost essence of life is too great a question for human reason to comprehend and that it cannot be ruled out that a supernatural intervention was required in the beginning, they argue. But that does ot mean that the origin and development of life contradicts the laws of nature.

Scientists point to natural explanations for the improbable events on which life was based. What is life? In each small drop of water, since time immemorial, an unimaginably large number of chemical reactions have occurred. These reactions later led to the emergence of life forms and species.

Most life forms are extremely complex constructions. For example, man and his DNA are impossible to construct artificially. All attempts in that direction have failed completely.

DNA’s capacity to store information is also quite incredible. In comparison, the information in all the books in the world written throughout the ages could be stored in a space equivalent to the head of a pin. And to build a memory with the capacity of the brain would require an incredibly large facility.

All this that man, the intelligent life, cannot create himself, the life process manages in a natural way. And this in a very short time. No one understood how this is possible.

Complexity and Evolution

Creating artificial life therefore seems a completely impossible thought. Nevertheless, the research and experiments in that field continue. To be the first to succeed in this have long been a dream among scientists. This wouldn’t only provide great knowledge about the basic functions of life, but at the same time offer completely new working methods within, among other things, medical research. What is life?

The complexity of life has increased over time. No one knew why evolution behaves this way. But the scientists are able to prove that originally the complexity was very low and then increased to the point where various simple life forms such as bacteria and other single-celled organisms arose. These then became multicellular and increasingly complex until plants, animals, and humans were born.

The law of the ever-increasing complexity of the universe, where complexity at a certain stage leads to different life forms and in time to such things as plants, animals, and humans, show where scientists have to start. What is life? They must begin with the origin and emergence of complexity.

The complexity had to do with information. How it was organized. In order for life to arise, information must be organized in a certain way. But that wasn’t enough. The scientists often add that the information must be organized in a meaningful way.

Many scientists believe that the universe is an open system with a constant influx of both nutrition and energy like any life form. This mechanism for the origin of the universe gave it its fundamental function of both generating and sustaining life in all its forms. And the mechanism also provided the universe with the function that transmitted the information that ultimately formed the complex information contained in all DNA and RNA strands. Life and the universe were connected. Understanding what is life and how it connects to the universe is crucial.

The conclusion is that there must be some kind of mechanism that generated this information somewhere out in the cosmos. Some researchers refer to the way the universe works, and more precisely to the information mechanism that generates the universe itself. The essence of what is life lies in this intricate connection.

The question, however, is, where was this information to be found and how did it get to the planets to then be able to form the long information-rich strings that DNA/RNA contain. The strings that creates life.

This mechanism must have been active over a long period of time and may still be active. Debaters ask which emerged first. Did the universe arise first and then the information, which gave rise to organic life? Or was it the other way around? Information arose first, gave matter, energy and created the universe which in turn gave life?

Whatever the correct answer, everyone realizes that this life-giving process is still going on. The origin of life is thus compatible with the origin of matter.

Now the astrobiologists think they know how matter arose. It turned out to be extremely revealing to compare the passage of events with how life arose. Physicists have long ago discovered that particles of matter could be created if enough energy was concentrated in one and the same place. This process was demonstrated in laboratories using large accelerators.

Unfortunately, it didn’t completely solve the cosmological problem, as it led to the question of where this energy came from. The one that was required to create the cosmological matter. The assumption that the energy of the universe was simply there from the beginning was hardly an improvement on the assumption that matter was there from the beginning.

Some scientists, however, believe that it is important to explain, not the origin of matter, but the origin of information. While it was good science to look for a physical process that created matter, it was considered highly unscientific to imagine a process that creates information. Information wasn’t something that was obtained for free, like cosmic matter, but something that had to be worked for.

Most scientists are now convinced that there is a mechanism for how the building blocks of life obtained their necessary information. The protein received its building instructions from the DNA/RNA molecules. That was quite clear, but where had these got theirs? And how!? That was the big question.

Early religious explanations pointed to the creation of the world out of chaos or out of nothing by divine action. The recurring theme was that all life began in a kind of primordial mist and gradually took on increasingly solid forms. Gradually, increasingly complex forms of life arose. Right up to the present man, the intelligent life.

What came after that, the researchers could so far only speculate about. Some astrobiologists sometimes use to point out that man is more – much more – than just a physical body. Man has also a spiritual dimension, a spiritual structure. The scientists knew very little about this and it is also a sensitive topic of debate in scientific circles

Among other things, it is speculated whether it was intended that man would in the future develop the spiritual dimension at the expense of the physical body. Is this the ultimate meaning to the question what is life? That man returns to the primordial mist from which he originally descended?

Still, the biggest puzzle for astrobiology is how matter could become alive. Where did this inherent life force come from? Many scientists speculate that there was a primordial energy from the time the universe was formed. This energy still flowed around and produced the diverse life that existed in the universe. Understanding what is life involves exploring how this energy contributed to the constant evolution of increasingly complicated organisms. No one knew where it would end.

In the early religions of man, the creation gods represented cosmic forces at various levels of existence. When two such forces or energies united, a new force arose but on a lower level of existence. All creation stories contain this pictorial presentation of two opposite poles of nature.

Spirit and matter united and created new forms of life on a lower level. When spirit and matter united a new plane of consciousness was born or crystallized but at a lower level. The task of these life forms was to strive back to the higher level that had created them. The species would unite with the original energy and make it even stronger. This was the task of evolution in a nutshell.

However, the world was created in a series of very violent encounters. How life could emerge from these devastating and intense collisions is difficult to understand. And the emergence of intelligent life is even more difficult to understand. But the brain also has a connection with the universe at large, further complicating the understanding of what is life.

The Brain and Its Cosmic Connection

Namely, the brain has a structure, a way of functioning, which is basically the same as for the rest of the world. Also in the brain there are systems, which at their core have a source with a messy, chaos-like potential and around a separate system with a structured character. Understanding what is life involves recognizing that the solar systems with the planets are structured according to the same system. The same structure also occur in atoms with a nucleus and electrons orbiting the nucleus.

The world is everywhere built as a two-pole system, an internal tension depending on the relationship between the two poles. And between these two poles processes take place based on either selection or cooperation. Just as the galaxies have a black hole at their centre without the structure of time and space, the human brain also has a state where time or space didn’t exist. In this state the brain break down order into chaos, after which, according to the creativity function, it rebuilds chaos into order.

Something to think about.