Environmentally Structured Decoherence as a Physical Basis for Directionality in Prebiotic Chemistry

Quantum mechanics underlies all chemical reactions, yet long‑lived quantum coherence is unlikely to have played a direct role in the emergence of life. Instead, early Earth environments may have supported short‑lived, localized, and structure‑dependent coherence whose decay—rather than its preservation—shaped prebiotic chemistry. Here I propose that environmentally structured decoherence provides a physical framework through which environmental architecture constrains the generation, dissipation, and directional decay of quantum excitations. In structured settings such as ice matrices, auroral particle precipitation zones, magnetically focused atmospheric belts, and gas–liquid interfaces, decoherence proceeds along biased pathways shaped by confinement, electric fields, proton gradients, and magnetic topology. Across these diverse environments, a common principle emerges that structured dissipation consistently favors certain intermediates and suppresses others, offering a physically grounded mechanism for pregenetic selection and directional chemical evolution prior to replication. This perspective situates environmentally structured decoherence as the quantum‑level foundation of Environmental Structural Ecology, in which persistent chemical assemblies arise through repeated exposure to environmentally imposed directionality. By integrating quantum physics, geochemistry, and environmental structure, this framework provides a unified route to understanding how life emerged from environments that did not merely host reactions but actively shaped them.