Plausible Answers to Questions Regarding Abiogenesis on Prebiotic Earth
ORAL
Abstract
Evidence indicates Earth's surface acquired necessary life-giving volatile elements - carbon, nitrogen, sulfur - from a collision with a Mercury-like planetary embryo \textasciitilde 4.4 billion y ago. Icy comets containing hydrocarbons collided with a cooling prebiotic Earth to create impact reactive environments that - via classical anthropic causality - introduced primordial ``ribozyme-like'' RNA complexes which could duplicate a few molecular units per 24 hrs. Random classical processes introduced energetically accessible duplex RNA segments containing keto - amino (-NH$_{\mathrm{2}})$ hydrogen bonds, where hydrogen bonded amino protons were subjected to quantum uncertainty limits, $\Delta $x $\Delta $p$_{\mathrm{x}} \quad \ge \quad \hbar $/2. This introduced a probability of EPR arrangement, \textit{keto-amino ¯(entanglement)}$\to $\textit{ enol}$-$\textit{imine}, where reduced energy product protons are each shared between two indistinguishable sets of \textit{intramolecular} electron lone-pairs belonging to enol oxygen and imine nitrogen on opposite genome strands. Product protons participate in entangled quantum oscillations at \textasciitilde 4\texttimes 10$^{\mathrm{13}}$ s$^{\mathrm{-1\thinspace }}$(\textasciitilde 4800$^{\mathrm{\thinspace }}$m s$^{\mathrm{-1}})$ between near symmetric energy wells in decoherence-free subspaces until measured, in a genome groove, $\delta $t \textless \textless 10$^{\mathrm{-13}}$ s, by an evolutionary selected Grover's quantum bio-processor. This quantum entanglement resource for reactive evolution provides a sequence of \textasciitilde 12 incremental entanglement-enabled improvements to genome fitness, of the form: RNA-ribozyme $\to $ RNA-protein $\to $ DNA-protein.
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Authors
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Grant Cooper
Texas Tech University