El origen geológico de la vida: una perspectiva desde la meteorítica

Abstract

The origin of life is rooted in the most primitive events of planetary evolution, events which were faithfully registered by the extraterrestrial bodies today called meteorites, and which formed the main constituent of rocky planets, such as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. This register includes the chemical compounds precursors of life, as well as those high-energy events, whose nature could have accelerated the process of chemical evolution leading to life or delaying it.

On the other hand, Geology is the science that studies those objects and processes which have marked the planetary evolution of the interior of the Solar System, and consequently it is closely interrelated with the science of Meteoritics. This work analyses this intrinsic relationship by firstly considering the chemical and mineralogical properties of the actual meteorite populations because they represent the remaining of the objects (planetesimals), the coalescence of which formed the planets at the beginnings of the Solar Systems, and then deals with the negative or positive consequences of that accretionary process for the generation of life on Earth. As the main conclusion of this work thus, it may be stated that Geology and Meteoritics comprise the study natural processes intimately related with the early history of the Earth leading to the appearance of life only 1,000 million years (Ma) after the formation of the planet.