Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial
processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start.
As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic
molecules become the more complex biomolecules of life, because it must also
include the key environmental factors that permitted, modulated, and most
critically facilitated the prebiotic pathways to life's emergence. Moreover, we
ask how habitability, defined in part by the presence of liquid water, was
sustained so that life could persist and evolve to the point of shaping its own
environment. Researchers have successfully explored many chapters of Earth's
coevolving environments and biosphere spanning the last few billion years
through lenses of sophisticated analytical and computational techniques, and
the findings have profoundly impacted the search for life beyond Earth. Yet
life's very beginnings during the first hundreds of millions of years of our
planet's history remain largely unknown--despite decades of research. This
report centers on one key point: that the earliest steps on the path to life's
emergence on Earth were tied intimately to the evolving chemical and physical
conditions of our earliest environments. Yet, a rigorous, interdisciplinary
understanding of that relationship has not been explored adequately and once
better understood will inform our search for life beyond Earth. In this way,
studies of the emergence of life must become a truly interdisciplinary effort,
requiring a mix that expands the traditional platform of prebiotic chemistry to
include geochemists, atmospheric chemists, geologists and geophysicists,
astronomers, mission scientists and engineers, and astrobiologists.
