Projektnummer

0065465

Zusammenfassung

The most fundamental unifying properties of life are i) that life harnesses environmental energy to promote chemical reactions, ii) that those chemical reactions are carbon-based and iii) that the reactions of life are promoted by catalysts, which merely accelerate reactions that occur anyway. There has to be a natural tendency for the molecules central to life to form spontaneously and to organize towards higher complexity under the right conditions. Those conditions must have existed on the early Earth. The search for those conditions is the search for catalysts. The geochemical proc...