Origin of Life - The Moon Factor (Olmf)

The Moon influences almost every major process occurring on Earth—from tides and subtle perturbations to axial stability, eclipses, and the geodynamical processes that sustain Earth's magnetic shield. Why, then, was it left out of the origin of life? The origin of life on Earth remains unresolved not because organic chemistry is impossible, but because the mechanism by which molecular synthesis becomes persistent biological organisation has never been identified. Miller and Urey's 1953 experiment demonstrated that prebiotic chemistry is possible. It did not demonstrate the mechanism by which that chemistry became life. This paper argues that mechanism was the Earth-Moon system itself. Three connected propositions are advanced: Co-origin and atmospheric retention bifurcation. Earth and Moon co-originated from the same nebular material at the same heliocentric distance. Atmospheric retention — operating from the moment of mass asymmetry between the co-forming bodies — is the primary mechanism explaining their compositional divergence, without requiring an unverifiable singular impact event. Angular momentum as environmental inheritance. The angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system requires no catastrophic injection. It is an inherited property of the Protoplanetary disk environment, directly observable in young stellar systems such as HL Tauri. The tidal PCR mechanism. The Moon's proximity during the Hadean and early Archean — at roughly 55–60% of its current distance, with Earth rotating on a 12–18 hour day — generated tidal cycling periods of 2–6 hours. This functioned as the planetary-scale equivalent of the polymerase chain reaction: flooding events dissociating molecular assemblies, evaporation concentrating and annealing them, repeated cycling driving the replication of informational sequences. Mars extends the confirmation to a second mass scale. At 0.107 Earth masses, Mars fell below the same atmospheric retention threshold, replicating the Moon's volatile loss, atmospheric collapse, and lifelessness. The potassium isotope fractionation gradient across planetary bodies (R² = 0.995, correlating δ⁴¹K with surface gravity) quantifies what the Moon and Mars demonstrate qualitatively. The paper also challenges the Giant Impact hypothesis on isotopic, compositional, and angular-momentum grounds, arguing that planetary science has systematically over-discretized a continuous thermodynamic process into isolated narrative events more compatible with human cognitive preference than with astrophysical continuity. The Moon was not adjacent to the origin of life. It was the mechanism.