Inaugural Prebiotic Chemistry & Early Earth Environments (PCE3) Community Workshop

The NASA Astrobiology Program invites you to join the first Community Workshop of its Research Coordination Network: Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments (PCE₃).

This workshop is designed to cross-pollinate between different areas of research addressing origins of life, including early earth geoscience and prebiotic chemistry. This workshop will foster intellectual cooperation and innovation across the community and thereby give rise to novel research avenues. A central goal is to root models for the emergence of prebiotic pathways in realistic planetary conditions, and fully integrate the dynamics and constraints of early Earth environments into origins hypotheses. Beyond our planet, PCE₃ aims to identify planetary conditions that can or cannot give rise to life’s chemistry, thus guiding future missions that target the discovery of habitable worlds.

Workshop speakers have been asked to give a state-of-the-art talk in their respective sub-theme to other fields of the Origins of Life community. These talks will be accessible to a non-specialist and aim to highlight the points of agreement, the important remaining debates, uncertainties, and essential next steps. The presentations are meant to be “neutral” in that they don’t advocate for any specific model, but instead cover the range of scientific opinions. The talks will explain explicitly how these interdisciplinary themes are relevant and important to the Origin of Life community. The foundational information presented in this workshop will enable future workshops and collaborations that bridge the many disciplines that are part of (PCE₃).

Each of five interdisciplinary themes will be the focus of one week of the workshop:

5. Peering into the Past with Today’s Biochemistry

The primer talks will be posted on Monday, November 16.

The discussion meeting on this topic will be on Friday, November 20, at 1pm Eastern Daylight Time. For more information and to register, visit: http://prebioticchem.org/workshop/workshop.html.