Inorganic Life in Space?
I’ll have more to write about his later after I read the full journal article, but appears that researchers have found evidence that dust-particles in space are forming into helical structures which exhibit characteristics associated with living things. In other words, inorganic life.
Some questions that naturally arise are: what is life? What is consciousness, and what kind of systems does it require (if any at all)? Can there be consciousness on atomic and sub-atomic levels?
Here’s the abstract of the article, “From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter”, published in the New Journal of Physics:
“Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as ‘memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex ’state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.”
You can also read an article about this on physorg.com: “‘It might be life Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities.”