Life as a Self-Sustaining Non-Equilibrium State: From Molecular Fluctuations to the Organization of Living Matter

The origin of life is traditionally investigated through the emergence of biomolecules, metabolic pathways, replication, and compartmentalization. These approaches, however, leave open a more general question: what physical principle could be shared by primitive prebiotic systems and contemporary living cells despite billions of years of biological evolution?This article proposes that life may be understood as a self-sustaining non-equilibrium state of matter in which a continuous flow of free energy and its dissipation enable the system to continually restore its own organization despite molecular fluctuations. Building on Prigogine’s framework of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and dissipative structures 1, we explore the possibility that the fundamental characteristic of life is not a particular molecule, metabolic pathway, or morphology, but a dynamic coupling between fluctuations, energy flows, dissipation, and organizational renewal across multiple spatial and temporal scales.