so in the begining there were gases and stuff like hydrogn. overtime cuz of gravity they came together and made new stuff like oxygen. but all these were non living gases so how did things like FUBA or Ameba come from
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Life is a special kind of pattern that can use energy to copy itself and act when things change around them. Lets look at another self copying pattern, fire.
Fire is when really hot stuff burns with the air and makes it even more hot. Most fire is burnable stuff like wood or plastic getting hot and combining with air to turn some of the burnable stuff into really hot air and ash. It is a pattern of change. This pattern can spread, as long as there is energy available in the form of burnable stuff. A bunch of piles of wood are sitting around, dead, but if you release fire into one part it can spread around to all of the wood and consume it. The fire copies itself and makes more fire out of the burnable things. It even breaths air and makes waste like living things do.
Everyone is taught what a fire needs: energy in fuel, air, heat. If it has those things, fire can exist and spread. Those are the basic rules for fire to be “alive” and spread. Life is similar, it has basic needs and if they are met it can spread. Life is a lot more complicated than fire, but it has similar basic needs: energy in fuel, air, water, nutrients. Instead of using heat to copy ourselves like fire, we use nutrients and water to build cells.
Most agree that a cell is the most basic piece of life, and it is made up of stuff like organelles and other small machines that we don’t consider life because they cant make more of themselves on their own. A cell has all the machines in it to eat fuel and air, release the energy, fix itself, and make more cells. Cells are made of lots of proteins, which are chains of molecules that fold themselves up into useful shapes. Proteins are like Lego, they can be assembled into little nano-robots that can move around, carry things, make and break things. Cells are partially made of proteins and can make proteins.
Proteins are considered dead because they don’t make more of themselves, they are more like a wrench or a vacuum cleaner that our cells use to get stuff done. But imagine if you had a big pile of tools as big as a house and they were all mixed up and could stick together, you may get lucky and end up with an assembly of tools that does something useful. It is harder to imagine an actual hammer and TV being thrown together to make something better, but for proteins the rules are different and this happens sometimes. If it happens enough and some other things go right, you could get a very basic cell.
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