It has been a long accepted idea that the beginnings of life played out in a warm ocean. The so called primordial soup. But recent research suggests that life may have got going in pockets of water trapped in ice.
The beginnings of life is a real interesting topic. There are a few things we know for sure. Life does exist. Well actually thats about all we know for sure about where life came from. There are several possibilities for the origin of life on earth. I think I'll briefly go through a few here.
Extra Terrestrial
The possibility exists that life came to earth from space. It could have come here in the form of microbes or other such replicators on an asteroid. It may have come from mars. It may have come from another solar system. This is an idea that is gradually losing support tho. Finding life elsewhere in our solar system, or out in the galaxy, that resembled our own would give more weight to this theory.
Intelligently designed
Now to be clear. When I say that life on earth could be intelligently designed. I mean designed by either an alien biological intelligence or an artificial intelligence. Not an omni present, all powerful and wholly fictitious sky magician. The possibility that life on earth was started by an intelligence is intriguing and may be impossible to ever completely rule out. It is possible that an intelligence of some type seeded our planet about 4 billion years ago with some type of replicating molecule. Or they may have jumped ahead and gone for full blown life right away.
It seems pointless to guess at the motives of such an agent. But it's fun to do it anyway. So I'm gonna.
It might be that they are running a large, long term experiment of some kind. They may simply have thought that the earth would be better if there was life here. They may have been trying to spread their own biology out into the universe. Or they may have done it with the hope that some species emerge that may be suitable to serve as their slaves.
The reason I said that this may be impossible to disprove is that it is hard to imagine a way that we could distinguish life that arose here out of non-life. From life that came here from somewhere else. If we discovered life elsewhere in the universe that was similar to our own. Then we may be able to infer a relationship. But even if life elsewhere is different. Independent origins don't necessarily mean that our life arose on earth. The problem is that early forms of life leave no trace and so it is difficult, and maybe impossible, to prove they were ever here.
Terrestrial Origin
Life evolved here on earth a few billion years ago. I find this to be the most reasonable explanation for the existence of life on earth. It starts with a single molecule that is capable of replication. That is it takes other molecules from its environment and makes a copy of itself. We know this can happen. It's going on right now inside your cells and in the cells of all living things on earth. Once in a while. One of these replicating molecules makes a mistake in the copying process. The resulting molecule is slightly different and so has different properties. Most of the time these mistakes occur. The resulting molecule is useless and unable to replicate. But every now and then. One of these changes results in a molecule that replicates itself faster. This molecule now has an advantage over the others and so it makes more copies of its self and BAM!!!!
Evolution has arrived.
The new research has to do with the reactions that created that first replicator. As I said, it was previously thought that these took place in warm water. A warmer environment means more energy means quicker reactions. However the study found that the reactions taking place in the cold water started out slowly. But they kept on going, caught up to and passed the warm water reactions that had stalled. If this new idea turns out to be true. It could have some really neat implications. The best of which is that there is a lot of ice in our solar system. Mars has subsurface ice. Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, is completely covered in ice and planet scientists believe it has a liquid ocean underneath. If life can get going in cold and icy conditions. Then it increases the chances that we may be able to find life on another world right in our own back yard.
Now that would be something truly mind blowing.
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