Origin of Life

The notion of artificial intelligence, AI, or just plain intelligence at its deepest level pertains to life. There are plenty of objects in the universe as small as atoms and molecules all the way up to giant planets, stars, and galaxies, which are active in some form all the time and interact with each other, change forms, merge with each other, and even are born, but they are not necessarily alive or intelligent. As per the current theory of origin of universe, all the objects as well as source of energy came into existence starting with the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago, and since then, all these entities have been at work at every instant of time. Why and how exactly the Big Bang was initiated or what was the universe made up of before the Big Bang is something we don’t know and may never know with full confidence. However, if we assume that something made it happen, we can understand, or at least estimate, all the subsequent activities. What is more important is that we can understand the current state of the universe with a lot more detail and confidence. We understand that our Earth is a planet, and it revolves around the Sun along with seven other planets. We understand how the orbits of each of these planets and their speeds of rotations around themselves and around the Sun are determined by their individual masses and the mutual distances between them and the Sun as well as between each other. We can calculate these metrics based on Newton’s law of gravitational force (or even more accurately using Einstein’s theory of general relativity and curvature of spacetime). We even understand to some extent how the Sun itself is bound with the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and rotates around it and how the Milky Way galaxy itself interacts with our neighboring galaxy Andromeda, and so on. We can also observe and predict the motions of various asteroids and comets based on their sizes and distances. However, from the perspective of being intelligent, none of these objects really exhibit intelligence. These objects are just following the fundamental laws of physics, and there is nothing new coming out of them. Even though at the very microscopic level, quantum mechanical laws may indicate some random and unpredictable events; at the macro level, none of these objects exhibit any unpredictable behavior or a behavior that would proactively change their actions for achieving some ulterior goals. For example, we don’t see planet Mars proactively trying to come close to the Sun by altering its shape in order to get more heat, as it’s feeling cold; or we don’t see an asteroid changing its direction to avoid a crash with planet Earth, which is bound to terminate the asteroid permanently. This is where we draw a line and separate the living from the non-living, separate intelligent objects from not-intelligent objects. In summary, the word intelligence, the way we interpret it at least, is intrinsically linked with the concept of life. Hence, we will start our journey with the notion of life. In this chapter, we will explore what life is and what really separates it from everything else.