Life sets off a cascade of machines.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39854238.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.2418000122 and PMC identifier 11789027.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
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Abstract
Life is invasive, occupying all physically accessible scales, stretching between almost nothing (protons, electrons, and photons) and almost everything (the whole biosphere). Motivated by seventeenth-century insights into this infinity, this paper proposes a language to discuss life as an infinite double cascade of machines making machines. Using this simplified language, we first discuss the micro-cascade proposed by Leibniz, which describes how the self-reproducing machine of the cell is built of smaller submachines down to the atomic scale. In the other direction, we propose that a macro-cascade builds from cells larger, organizational machines, up to the scale of the biosphere. The two cascades meet at the critical point of 10<sup>3</sup> s in time and 1 micron in length, the scales of a microbial cell. We speculate on how this double cascade evolved once a self-replicating machine emerged in the salty water of prebiotic earth.