Looking for Life Before Life

There is a particular kind of scientific restlessness that arises from contemplating a boundary. Not a political one, or a geological one, but a conceptual one. The boundary between chemistry and biology. Between things that simply react, and things that endure, organise, and behave in ways that seem eerily like life.

For over a hundred years, that boundary has been seen as mysterious. We were told that life somehow appeared. The details were vague, speculative, often slipping into the realm of origin myths with scientists in lab coats. The issue wasn’t a lack of imagination, but a lack of mechanisms that felt plausible enough to satisfy a curious physicist or chemist.

Recently, something interesting has been happening. Two very different lines of research, one theoretical and one experimental, are starting to converge. Not on poetry or metaphors, but on plausible pathways. They do not yet tell us exactly what life is, but they are beginning to show how biogenic life might have begun.

And that, for those of us interested in the deeper question of biotropy, is a subtle but significant shift.

When Chemistry Starts Doing Things

The first line of research lives mostly in equations, simulations, and abstract chemical spaces. It asks a deceptively simple question: at what point does a chemical system stop being a collection of reactions and start behaving like a system?

It seems the answer might be statistical rather than miraculous.

As chemical diversity increases, networks of reactions can reach a threshold where they become collectively self-sustaining. Molecules catalyse reactions that produce other molecules which, in turn, catalyse more reactions. Energy flows through the network, but importantly, the constraints guiding that energy are created by the system itself.

This idea, sometimes called constraint closure, has significant implications. It means that organisation is not imposed from outside; it arises from within. The system creates the very rules that sustain it.

Once that occurs, something new emerges. The network actively maintains itself, responding to changes in its environment. It isn’t alive in any familiar way, but it is no longer purely chemistry either. It exists in that liminal space where agency begins to flicker into view.

From a biogenic perspective, this matters enormously. It suggests that life is not an anomaly but a natural phase transition within sufficiently complex chemical systems. Given the right conditions, matter doesn’t just break down; it organises.

Sparks in the Spray

The second line of research could not be more different in style. It is messy, physical, and wonderfully unsophisticated. Instead of equations, it uses water, gases, and a phenomenon most of us would never notice.

When water breaks into tiny droplets, like in ocean spray or waterfalls, those droplets can separate electric charge. Under the right conditions, they generate tiny discharges, essentially microscopic lightning.

What happens next is the intriguing part.

Those micro-discharges have enough energy to initiate the formation of organic molecules with carbon–nitrogen bonds. Not exotic compounds, but the fundamental precursors of amino acids and nucleic acids. No dramatic thunderstorm needed. No unlikely spark from the heavens. Just water, air, and movement.

This is important for a simple reason: it suggests that prebiotic chemistry could have been common, long-lasting, and normal. The early Earth didn’t rely on rare events to develop complexity. Instead, it required environments where energy gradients were continuously harnessed in small, local ways.

Once you have a steady supply of building blocks, the abstract models of self-sustaining chemical networks no longer seem so abstract. They become plausible.

Convergence, Not Closure

What makes this moment interesting isn’t that either line of research has solved the origin of life. They haven’t. The mystery remains, as it should.

What has shifted is the direction of travel.

On one side, theory suggests that chemical systems can, under suitable conditions, develop their own organisation and basic agency. On the other, experiments indicate that the raw materials for such systems could have formed through common physical processes, widely dispersed across the early planet.

Taken together, they suggest a biogenic origin that is neither mystical nor trivial. Life does not begin as a sudden leap but as a gradual build-up of self-favouring organisation. Matter learns, through physics, how to persist.

This does not tell us what life ultimately is. It does not explain consciousness, meaning, or purpose. But it does suggest that biotropy, the tendency of systems to organise toward life-like states, is not an illusion. It may be a natural consequence of energy flowing through matter under constraint.

The search continues. Not for a single defining moment, but for a deeper understanding of why the universe seems so willing to organise itself into things that preference staying organised.