Environmentally Structured Dissipation as a Source of Directionality in Prebiotic Chemistry

Quantum mechanics underlies all chemical reactions, yet long-lived quantum coherence is unlikely to have played a sustained role in the origin of life. Instead, early Earth environments repeatedly generated transient molecular excitations that underwent decoherence, energy relaxation, chemical transformation, and product retention under nonequilibrium conditions. Here I propose that environmentally structured dissipation provides a physical framework in which environmental organization constrains these dissipative processes, thereby generating directional biases in prebiotic chemical evolution. Within this framework, environmentally structured decoherence represents one component of a broader sequence linking transient excitation, reaction branching, and product retention. Structured environments, including ice matrices, hydrothermal systems, auroral particle precipitation regions, and gas–liquid interfaces, may repeatedly bias molecular pathways through confinement, physicochemical gradients, electric fields, and related environmental constraints. A phenomenological model illustrates how small environmentally induced biases can accumulate through repeated environmental cycles to produce persistent differences in product distributions. This framework generates experimentally testable predictions and provides a unified perspective linking open quantum systems, nonequilibrium chemistry, and structured prebiotic environments.