page_title: Freeman Dyson
section_title: The Origin of Life
hierarchical_section_title: Freeman Dyson / Concepts / The Origin of Life
caption_attribution_description: Dyson rings forming a stable Dyson swarm, but making it look as similar to a Dyson sphere and Niven ring as possible. Individual objects are unrealistically large to show their shape. Each ring can be replaced by multiple rings in this way (see also). For a stable orbit a ring can be of individual objects, or like this to save on thrusters:
context_page_description: Freeman John Dyson FRS was a British-American theoretical and mathematical physicist, mathematician and statistician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
context_section_description: Dyson favored the dual origin theory: that life first formed as cells, then enzymes, and finally, much later, genes. This was first propounded by the Russian Alexander Oparin. J. B. S. Haldane developed the same theory independently. In Dyson's version of the theory life evolved in two stages, widely separated in time. Because of the biochemistry he regards it as too unlikely that genes could have developed fully blown in one process. Current cells contain adenosine triphosphate or ATP and adenosine 5'-monophosphate or AMP, which greatly resemble each other but have completely different functions. ATP transports energy around the cell, and AMP is part of RNA and the genetic apparatus. Dyson proposed that in a primitive early cell containing ATP and AMP, RNA and replication came into existence only because of the similarity between AMP and RNA. He suggested that AMP was produced when ATP molecules lost two of their phosphate radicals, and then one cell somewhere performed Eigen's experiment and produced RNA.
  There is no direct evidence for the dual origin theory, because once genes developed, they took over, obliterating all traces of the earlier forms of life. In the first origin, the cells were probably just drops of water held together by surface tension, teeming with enzymes and chemical reactions, and having a primitive kind of growth or replication. When the liquid drop became too big, it split into two drops. Many complex molecules formed in these "little city economies" and the probability that genes would eventually develop in them was much greater than in the prebiotic environment.
caption: Artist's concept of Dyson rings, forming a stable Dyson swarm, or "Dyson sphere"
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