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1 1 Hadean: comes from the name Hades, which refers to the Greek god of the underworld.

2 2 Archean: from the ancient Greek Aρχή/Arkhē, which means “beginning, origin”.

3 3 MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

4 4 TIGR: The Institute for Genomic Research.

Andreas LOSCH

Faculty of Theology, University of Bern, Switzerland

How can we characterize the nature of life? Against other assumptions, science has shown that life is nothing but physics and chemistry, and that there is no mysterious vital force included. Still, life strikes us as special. Can we describe this by its form? What definitions of life are actually in use? Maybe we need another sort of language to describe life’s specialty.

This chapter will deal with the question of the nature of Life on Earth, so life-as-we-know it. The astrobiological quest for the search for extraterrestrial life is certainly very worthwhile to pursue, as in the case of success we would have a greater sample of life than only the one sharing common ancestry on Earth and hence would probably learn a great deal more about the laws of nature governing the emergence of life (Sagan 2010, p. 306). Does every life need to follow the “right-handed” chirality (orientation) of its molecules employed by Earth life, for instance? Does life need to be carbon-based or is this only valid for its Earthly form?

In the current absence of such further samples, I believe it, however, to be most important to stick to what we know about Earth life to attempt at understanding more of its very nature. We do not know so very much about its origins and its essence, besides that it is physics and chemistry, with an evolutionary history, for sure (Lazcano 2017b, p. 90).