Plasma Concept of the Origin of Life under Mete-orite Impact in the Process of Earth Formation and Mass Accumulation

An original Plasma Concept of the origin of simplest forms of living matter during the expansion of the plasma forming in the process of a hypervelocity meteorite impact onto the Earth surface is proposed. The concept uses the fact that meteorite bodies were the main contributors to the accumulation of the Earth mass. The feasibility of the concept is confirmed by the results of direct impact experiments and experiments with laser modeling of hypervelocity impact processes involving the generation of plasma identical to impact one. It is shown that during the adiabatic explosive expansion and cooling of the plasma the conditions form that ensure the possibility of stochastic synthesis of simplest and complex molecular structures including those with chirality. Constant unidirectional ring-shaped magnetic field is shown to form in the process of the impact plasma expansion, and that this field interacts with the UV radiation of the plasma to form local physical chiral medium causing moderate breaking of mirror symmetry of enantiomers synthesized in the plasma with the predominant formation of L amino acids and D sugars. At the final stage of this expansion the impact plasma reached both anomalously high catalytic activity and the peak rate of plasma processes, making possible the assembly and ordering of high-molecular structures that could contribute to achieving enantioenrichment or even enantiopurity with the growth of the characteristic size of the plasma region. The earlier proposed protoviroid – a hypothetical virus-like organism – is used as the model of the most primitive living being. The mass of the protoviroid, which consisted of 300 nucleotides and 100 amino acids, did not exceed 100 kDa. The estimates obtained showed that the crust- and meteorite-material plasma processed during the accumulation of the nominal Earth mass could ensure no less than 1047 statistical trials required for the synthesis of a “correct” sequence of a protoviroid monomers. It is also shown conclusively, based on experimental results, that abiogenous processes accompanying the expansion of meteorite plasma and crater formation satisfied all the requirements needed to ensure the emergence of a protoviroid and formation of a medium allowing the survival of the first living being in the geological history of the Earth. Keywords: life origin; meteorite impact; plasma; breaking mirror symmetry; homochirality; enantiopurity; stochastic synthesis; statistical sampling