[essopenarchive.org] Extraterrestrial material has often been evaluated as delivered cargo: amino acids, nucleobases, organics, brines, or biological vectors.
A boundary-condition approach asks how arrival altered the chemical state space in which early Earth systems persisted, failed, or expanded across prebiotic, transitional, and postbiotic domains. Carbonaceous meteorites and returned asteroid samples carry amino acids, nucleobases, sugars, ammonia, salts, and phosphorus-bearing phases, with organic inventories shaped by heterogeneous aqueous alteration.
Extraterrestrial events also perturb atmospheric redox, nutrients, hydrothermal habitats, and radiation. I propose treating these inputs as exogenous chemical boundary conditions whose biological significance depends on the Interface Concentration Factor, retention time, catalytic coupling, patch-scale export, and durable ecological change.
Under this framework, external material opens opportunity spaces for differential filtering of reaction networks, protocellular systems, microbial communities, and gene families.
The program yields falsifiable tests in stratigraphic and experimental archives, with phylogenomic event studies treated as downstream covariance tests; the Interface Concentration Factor links delivered flux to biologically accessible exposure in interface-rich planetary environments.
Extraterrestrial Chemical Boundary Conditions and Evolutionary Opportunity Space on Early Earth, essopenarchive.org
Astrobiology,
