Traditional research on the origin of life has been fixed on the assumption that the Archean continents were barren and devoid of extensive terrestrial photosynthetic vegetation, and has relied on the Miller-Urey primordial soup and submarine hydrothermal vent hypotheses to infer the emergence of life. Both theories suffer from inherent deficiencies, including insufficient mineral nutrient supply, inability to achieve long-term organic matter enrichment, failure to support the simultaneous origin of life on a global scale, and inability to explain globally consistent stratigraphic isotopic signals 4. This paper completely eliminates the role of hydrothermal vent crystal lattices and nutrient supply, constructing a purely terrestrial surface closed-loop system. By integrating modern observations of wildfire hydrology and rock-soil interactions, high-temperature rock-soil water-quenching fragmentation experiments, Archean stratigraphic vegetation traces, and paleo-geochemical data, this paper establishes an empirically grounded core conclusion: intact, stable mineral crystal lattices are chemically inert and self-locking, incapable of binding organic molecules or assembling life structures 1218; only defect-bearing crystal lattices formed through dual external fragmentation possess the capacity for adsorption, catalysis, and associative bonding, constituting the sole material foundation for the origin of life 1213. This paper extends the author‘s two previously published preprints on the Fireball system 1116, refining the empirical mechanism of dual crystal lattice fragmentation: first, continent-wide wildfires at high temperatures thermally decompose organic matter and silicate mineral lattices in surface rocks and soils 14; second, the high-temperature, hardened rocks and soils after fire roasting, upon encountering rainfall, undergo thermal shock water-quenching fragmentation, further tearing mineral lattices and generating massive quantities of ultrafine reactive mineral mud 17. Rainfall transports these thermally shattered rock materials and vegetation ash as continent-wide mineral-laden muddy water into the adjacent primordial oceans, which, combined with the ocean’s endogenous materials, comprehensively supplies phosphorus, reactive iron, potassium, calcium, silicon, and transition metals—the full set of life-limiting elements 79. To address the gap in wildfire fuel supply, this paper proposes an adaptive inferential conjecture: the early-to-mid Archean continents, sustained by freshwater and atmospheric moisture, were covered with drought-tolerant low-lying photosynthetic vegetation and terrestrial microbial mats that could propagate across the continents wherever water was present 10, providing sufficient fuel and combustion temperatures for planet-wide continental wildfires.This paper presents a core empirically confirmed geological mechanism: modern wildfires have already demonstrated that burned high-temperature rocks and soils readily undergo physical fragmentation and mud formation upon contact with water, and post-fire rainfall readily transports massive quantities of activated minerals into water bodies 717; Archean continent-wide wildfires would have amplified this effect, producing planet-scale inputs of activated mineral mud water. The origin of life was not an instantaneous chemical reaction but a process spanning billions of years, with each round of continental wildfire delivering a batch of activated crystal lattices and organic small molecules, piece by piece, iteration by iteration, gradually evolving primitive cells capable of metabolism and self-replication 1213. The paper strictly distinguishes between evidentiary conclusions and adaptive conjectures: the crystal lattice fragmentation principle, water-fire fragmentation mechanisms, and modern and ancient field observations are empirical conclusions; the complete coverage of Archean continents by terrestrial vegetation is an adaptive inferential conjecture—with clear boundaries between the two—constructing a complete model of “fire fragmentation of lattices + water quenching of lattices + muddy water nutrient transport + billion-year stepwise assembly of life,” linking the 4-billion-year unified Fireball cycle system from the Archean origin of life to Phanerozoic mass extinctions and global fossil fuel accumulation 1116, and fundamentally reconstructing the understanding of life’s origin on Earth.
Xiaogang Li (Thu,) studied this question.