Foreword, "Are There Men on the Moon?" / Winston S. Churchill   xiii
Preface   xix
Appendix to Preface / Richard Gordon and George Mikhailovsky   xxv

Part I: Introduction to the Origin of Life Puzzle   1
1. Origin of Life: Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life / Sohan Jheeta and Elias Chatzitheodoridis   3
2. Characterizing Life: Four Dimensions and their Relevance to Origin of Life Research / Emily C. Parke   33
3. Emergence, Construction, or Unlikely? Navigating the Space of Questions Regarding Life's Origins / Stuart Bartlett and Michael L. Wong   53

Part II: Chemistry Approaches   65
4. The Origin of Metabolism and GADV Hypothesis on the Origin of Life / Kenji Ikehara   67
5. Chemical Automata at the Origins of Life / Andre Brack   89
6. A Universal Chemical Constructor to Explore the Nature and Origin of Life /Geoffrey J. T. Cooper, Sara I. Walker and Leroy Cronin   101
7. How to Make a Transmembrane Domain at the Origin of Life: A Possible Origin of Proteins / Richard Gordon and Natalie K. Gordon   131

Part III: Physics Approaches   175
8. Patterns that Persist: Heritable Information in Stochastic Dynamics / Peter M. Tzelios and Kyle J. M. Bishop   177
9. When We Were Triangles: Shape in the Origin of Life via Abiotic, Shaped Droplets to Living, Polygonal Archaea During the Abiocene / Richard Gordon   213
10. Challenges and Perspectives of Robot Inventors that Autonomously Design, Build, and Test Physical Robots / Fumiya Iida, Toby Howison, Simon Hauser and Josie Hughes   263

Part IV: The Approach of Creating Life   279
11. Synthetic Cells: A Route Toward Assembling Life / Antoni Llopis-Lorente, N. Amy Yewdall, Alexander F. Mason, Loai K. E. A. Abdelmohsen and Jan C. M. van Hest   281
12. Origin of Life from a Maker's Perspective-Focus on Protocellular Compartments in Bottom-Up Synthetic Biology / Ivan Ivanov, Stoyan K. Smoukov, Ehsan Nourafkan, Katharina Landfester and Petra Schwille   303

Part V: When and Where Did Life Start?   327
13. A Nuclear Geyser Origin of Life: Life Assembly Plant - Three-Step Model for the Emergence of the First Life on Earth and Cell Dynamics for the Coevolution of Life's Functions / Shigenori Maruyama and Toshikazu Ebisuzaki   329
14. Comments on the Nuclear Geyser Origin of Life Proposal of the Authors S. Maruyama and T. Ebisuzaki and Interstellar Medium as a Possible Birthplace of Life / Jaroslav Jirik   361
15. Nucleotide Photochemistry on the Early Earth / Whitaker, D. E., Colville, B.W.F. and Powner, M. W.   369
16. Origins of Life on Exoplanets / Paul B. Rimmer   407
17. The Fish Ladder Toy Model for a Thermodynamically at Equilibrium Origin of Life in a Lipid World in an Endoreic Lake / Richard Gordon, Shruti Raj Vansh Singh, Krishna Katyal and Natalie K. Gordon   425

Acknowledgements   443
Appendix (Discussion with David Deamer)   443
References   447
Index   459

Stoyan Smoukov, PhD, is a Professor at Queen Mary University of London, leading the Active & Intelligent Materials (AIM) Lab (previously from 2012-2017 at the University of Cambridge). He has led pioneering research in multi-functional materials with the support of the prestigious European Research Council individual ERC grant. His focus on bottom-up design for inanimate materials has yielded novel artificial muscles, supercapacitors, multifunctional materials which can replace whole devices, the discovery of artificial morphogenesis, and combinatorial approaches to multi-functionality. Prof. Smoukov has published more than 95 journal papers, cited over 4000 times.

Joseph Seckbach, PhD, is a retired senior academician at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and did a post-doctorate in the Division of Biology at Caltech, in Pasadena, CA. He served at Louisiana State University (LSU), Baton Rouge, LA, USA, as the first selected Chair for the Louisiana Sea Grant and Technology Transfer. Professor Joseph Seckbach has edited over 40 scientific books and authored about 140 scientific articles.

Richard Gordon, PhD, is a theoretical biologist who retired from the Department of Radiology, University of Manitoba, in 2011. Presently, he is at the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab & Aquarium, Panacea, Florida. His interest in exobiology (now astrobiology) dates from 1960s undergraduate work on organic matter in the Orgueil meteorite with Edward Anders. He has published critical reviews of panspermia and the history of discoveries of life in meteorites, and with Stoyan Smoukov, worked on shaped droplets supporting the Archaea First Hypothesis.