Comets, Information, and the Origin of Life

Abstract

The triumph of Democritean materialism over biology in the nineteenth century was tempered in the twentieth century by the discovery that time was not eternal and that life was too complicated to spontaneously organize. This led to the paradox of assuming only material causes for life’s origin while making them practically impossible. We address this 150-year-old origin-of-life (OOL) problem by redefining it as an information threshold that must be crossed. Since Shannon information has too little capacity to describe life, we expand it to include time and correlated information. Generalized to Einstein’s spacetime, we show that information capacity implies information flow, and flows imply an “ether,” a material carrier. From recent discoveries of fossilized microbial life on carbonaceous CI1 meteorites whose D/H ratios, albedo, and elemental abundance are all cometary, we identify the material carrier with comets. With sufficient cometary density, which we hypothesize may be supplied by the missing galactic dark matter, nonlinear correlations amplify the probability that comets can assemble life from distributed information sources. If information is conserved, as suggested by many cosmologists, then this distributed information source becomes the boundary condition of the 4-sphere describing the Big Bang. Recent advances in theoretical physics suggest that the assumption of the conservation of information along with the conservation of energy is sufficient to derive Newton’s laws, making materialism a corollary of information and the OOL a trivial result of imposed Big Bang boundary conditions as transmitted through the cometary hydrosphere.