Climate and life: The species that exist and the conditions under which they continue

 Assembly theory is a new way of looking at the world where humans exist and how they might have come to be (Assembly of Life ). It includes not only all the things that exist now, but everything that existed in the past. It proposes a lineage of how things came to be as a series of combinatorial steps based on existing forms, each step leading to greater complexity. Looking at the present, we envision humans as a more complex descendant of primates, which developed from some primitive first mammal, and so on back to the first life form only able to interact with it's environment in a very limited way.

Meanwhile, as biological forms evolved over billions of years, the conditions under which their development occurred has altered from some rocky turbulent past to a more verdant world with an oxygen rich atmosphere. The earlier environment offered fewer combinatorial options to an emerging life entity. When the air became more populated with a variety of gases, air breathing life that developed could expand and flourish.

 

A New Idea for How to Assemble Life

In the abstract, assembly is like a mixing bowl of flour, eggs, and chocolate chips from which something beautiful can come into being. Now, think of the bowl as the conditions under which these components might be assembled. Is it so hot that the dough starts to bake before all the ingredients are added or is it so cold that nothing can be combined? Under various conditions, the list of all possible combinations might become limited by circumstance. 

The world I grew up in is very different from that in which my grandparents lived. Both of those worlds have changed over time: wide swaths of the natural world have been replaced by farms, cities, highways and factories. The air is full of particles and gases that were either not there before or are now there in much greater concentrations. The conditions under which some life forms developed no longer exist, while other possible life forms that may have arisen may never arise.

We have changed the playing field on which new life forms and new technologies might come into being. We now must focus on the set of technologies that can preserve the conditions under which we can continue to survive.

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