Eli5: (This prob sounds stupid) How did life forms come to be on earth? Like, how did something become ‘living’?
In: Biology
Oh, that’s a good one, I’ll give it a shot.
The short answer is, we don’t know for sure and if someone did, I’m sure Nobel Prize would be coming shortly after.
The difficulty comes from identifying the exact point of when something is “alive” and “dead”.
Today we can observe RNA (building block of virus and a sister to DNA of you and me) does remarkable things but it must have a host. It doesn’t do anything on its own. In order for virus to replicate, and we seem to agree that reproduction is a big part of “alive”, it needs more.
By contrast DNA does the reproduction on its own, it can create more of itself. How did it do that? When conditions were “just right”. What are those conditions? We still don’t know for sure.
So, how did we get from inorganic mix of chemicals to a living cell? A few theories have been proposed, including the “just right” conditions of tide pool or close to thermal underwater vents (temperature, pressure, etc) and a _lot_ of time.
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