We have wondered how life began ever since we had the wherewithal to wonder, I warrant. Generation after generation, inquiring minds have asked exactly that: a question that has no absolute answer, so far. A question so complex that many expect we’ll never figure it out, not for a fact.
Saying that, these days, we have a pretty decent theory. It’s all conjecture, of course, but breakthrough after breakthrough made in recent years appear to agree that in all likelihood, life began by way of RNA, or ribonucleic acid: a self-replicating molecule composed of four building blocks of a sort, two of which scientists have already successfully synthesised using the same simple chemicals that existed on Earth at the time the first fabled spark was struck.
But what if somewhere far from here—fully four years at the speed of light from the solar system we call home—life began in a very different manner? What if the building blocks it was fashioned from were fundamentally different? Would life find a way anyway?
That’s the question Stephen Baxter asks in his latest novel, Proxima, the first part of an absorbing and characteristically ambitious new duology about the colonisation of a vast exoplanet... and the answer? No less than a resounding yes.
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