LIFE AND INTELLIGENCE IN THE UNIVERSE FROM NANOBIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES: A SURVEY AND BUDGET OF CONCEPTS AND PERSPECTIVES

摘要

The new-born bioscience called Nanobiology has soon tackled the problems of the possibility of existence of extraterrestrial life and intelligence and of biosystem distribution in the Universe, as such questions actually belong to the realm of Theoretical Biology. The central, and yet unanswered points of such science have been reinvestigated by attempting knowledge and control of the hard-to-determine nanoscale-level classical and quantum interactions, which would supposedly give mechanistic, definite answers, both informationally and energetically, to the vexing questions put by biosystems to science: is the "living state" a physically definible concept, and how to define it? Are nanoscale kinetics or even detailed mechanics involved in the origin of life? What about intelligence, consciousness and their nanophysical roots? Are "life" and "intelligence" engineerable properties, or is any Artificial Intelligence program bound to mere metaphors? Self-organization, studied at the thermodynamic and the hydrodynamic level, showed the possibility of chemical evolution from amino acids, probably of cometary and/or meteoritic origin, up to spatiotemporal organization, autopoiesis and biological evolution, but didn't explain the origins of life. Questioning the uniqueness of the earthly evolutionary chemistry is cardinal for the ETI dilemma, as from a budgetary appraisal of perspectives in bionanoscale chaotic undecidable dynamics, quantum gravity and quantum vacuum, both "living state" and "intelligence" look like nonlocal, spacetime-linked cosmic phenomena.