Articles | Volume 19, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-1013-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-1013-2022
Peer-reviewed comment
 | 
16 Feb 2022
Peer-reviewed comment |  | 16 Feb 2022

Comment on “Fundamental molecules of life are pigments which arose and co-evolved as a response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating the prevailing solar spectrum” by K. Michaelian and A. Simeonov (2015)

Lars Olof Björn

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Cited articles

Altair, T., Borges, L. G. F., Galante, D., and Varela, H.: Experimental approaches for testing the hypothesis of the emergence of life at submarine alkaline vents, Life, 11, 777, https://doi.org/10.3390/life11080777, 2021. 
Arney, G., Domagal-Goldman, S.-D., Meadows, V. S., Wolf, E. T., Schwieterman, E., Charnay, B., Claire, M., Hébrard, E., and Trainer, M. G.: The pale orange dot: The spectrum and habitability of hazy Archean Earth, Astrobiology, 16, 873–898, https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2015.1422, 2016. 
Arney, G. N., Meadows, V. S., Domagal-Goldman, S. D., Deming, D., Robinson, T. D., Tovar, G., Wolf, E. T., and Schwieterman, E.: Pale Orange Dots: The Impact of Organic Haze on the Habitability and detectability of earthlike exoplanets, Astrophys. J., 836, 19 pp., https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/836/1/49, 2017. 
Bach, L. T., Tamsitt, V., Gower, J., Hurd, C. L., Raven, J. A., and Boyd, P. W.: Testing the climate intervention potential of ocean afforestation using the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, Nat. Commun., 12, 2556, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22837-2, 2021. 
Bacour, C., Bréon, F.-M., Gonzalez, L., Price, I., Muller, J.-P., and Straume, A. G.: Simulating multi-directional narrowband reflectance of the Earth's surface using ADAM (A surface reflectance database for ESA's Earth Observation Missions), Remote. Sens., 12, 1679, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12101679, 2020. 
Short summary
The origin and evolution of life do not contradict the laws of thermodynamics, but we have no proof that it is an inevitable consequence of these laws. We do not know if the first life arose under illumination or in darkness in the deep ocean or in the Earth's crust. We have no proof that it arose due to a thermodynamic imperative of dissipating the prevailing solar spectrum, as there are other ways for entropy increase in solar radiation. The biosphere may instead delay entropy production.
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