Turtles, or Crystals: A Speculative Synthesis on Substrate-Independent Life and the Topological Defect as Memory, Morphogen, and Transducer

A speculative, openly-licensed synthesis paper (preprint, not peer-reviewed) asking whether life's substrate must be carbon chemistry or could rest on crystal instead — "turtles all the way down," asked of life. Drawing on artificial life, the mineral origin-of-life tradition, information-theoretic accounts of life, condensed-matter defect physics, and quasispecies theory, it proposes that a single topologically protected lattice defect could serve three functions at once — heritable memory, the shaping of form, and the transduction of mechanical state into electrical signal — and that such a substrate would behave as a self-healing, fault-tolerant information network. Two falsifiable bridges are advanced as hypotheses: that topological protection is the physical fix for the low-fidelity wall that ended the mineral-heredity program, and that a crystalline replicator possesses an Eigen error threshold set by its defect-copying fidelity. The individual ingredients are established; the contribution is their synthesis plus concrete testable predictions on existing platforms. Every seam between grounded physics and conjecture is marked. Released under CC BY 4.0 for anyone to build upon.