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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The real answer is WE DON’T KNOW. If life were merely the sum of its parts then we should be able to create basic microbial life in a lab. But we cant. So given that it can’t even be recreated in the most advanced labs on that planet, it beggars belief to suggest it just “happened” in a pool near a lake somewhere.
Everything is made of atoms.
Atoms “like” to bond with other atoms in particular ways, in particular circumstances. It’s not too important now to understand why. it’s a bit like the way magnets attract or repel each other.
When a bunch of atoms combine together, we call them “molecules”. And molecules do the same thing atoms do. They attract or repel other molecules or atoms in certain ways in certain circumstances. Big molecules can be made of smaller molecules put together.
This is happening all around you, fast and slow. When we talk about “Chemical reactions” those are often bonds between these tiny things forming or breaking. It doesn’t take life to do this.
At some point there was a molecule that was arranged so that it had a neat trick. It was made like a ladder with each rung made from a pair of molecules that each attracted each other. So when the ladder was split down the middle, each molecule attracted the missing one and you ended up with two copies just the same. And what’s more important, the copies weren’t always perfect. If the molecule got a little bit of damage of something wasn’t available, copies might change a little.
Repeat this copying a bunch of times and you’ll have a lot of these molecules around. Repeat it even more and those tiny mistakes accidentally help the molecule to make more copies, faster. Any change that makes more copies, you get more of it. Little mutations (changes) would cause the molecule to stick more other molecules to itself, to build them from the surrounding available atoms and molecules. Remember, this took a very very very long time.
Some of the stuff it might have stuck around it may have made it less likely to dash against a rock and break. Because it helped it to make more copies, there were more of that. Some of the mutations allowed it to form a lump of molecules that wiggled, moving it crudely through the water. The ones that did that were more likely to run into resources to replicate, so there were more of these. Repeat these mutations enough and you arrive at what we would call a single celled organism, life. The protective cell wall, flagellum, a means of “eating” surrounding matter, these are all just little differences in the self copying strands that help the thing to make more copies.
The question is not *how did Nature find the right combination of molecules?* but *which is the most basic combination of molecules that Nature found and worked?*
Because molecules are so abundant and change so quickly, literally in fractions of a second, if you have a zillion aminoacids, you are going to have all the proteins you’d need to open DNA, copy it, read it, translate it, close it and copy it again. With a million amino groups, a million carboxylic groups and another million of simple organic molecules, you can have a million amino acids, and with those you can have thousands of proteins, and with those, millions of macro proteins. And in one single bucket of water you don’t have millions of molecules of amino acids, you have quintillions.
We still don’t know which was that first combination of molecules that nature found and worked, but remember: nature had millions of years and billions of chances to get it right just once.
The building blocks of life are already found out in the world. Nucleic acids, amino acids, carbohydrates and lipids. We know that lipid membranes (what the cell covering is made of) do form spontaneously. We also know that rna can make polymers spontaneously
The special aspect about rna is that it can do a lot of the functions that protein can do, such as be an enzyme. An enzyme is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction
The existence of enzymes is important, because most of the reactions in living things can occur outside them, its just that without enzymes they are too slow to support a living organism
So enzymes of rna (called ribozymes) are able to speed up reactions creating new ‘metabolic pathways’
Eventually a lipid membrane engulfed some rna which had gotten advanced enough to survive inside the lipid membrane, creating the first cell
The exact specifics of all this are unknown as of now. But many precursors to life are found occurring in inorganic environments
And where would this environment be? It would be the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. They are like mini volcanoes. They spew out a lot of minerals and other compounds from the earth’s crust making the water become concentrated with important chemicals of life. Otherwise the open ocean is just too dilute for anything to happen. These vents also provide much needed heat for chemical reactions
As soon as you have replication with variety, then you get evolution by natural selection. All that life needed was for some molecules to come about which keep their shape and make more of themselves. Things like lipids can form structures like membranes and clusters on their own.
Scientists are working to replicate the early earth conditions which could give rise to these proto-cells, and there are multiple proposed models.
man i was high af when i wrote this and completly forgot. now i come here and see all this and im amazed
What do you mean by FUBA? I assume it’s an acronym for first universal something but I can’t make sense of it and internet doesn’t help.
Life is basically a very complex self-sustaining chemical reaction. If conditions are right for many chemical reactions to occur. Most will occur and then peter out, but a few will become self-sustaining reactions. Over a long enough period of time the sustaining ones will become numerous enough to react with each other to form more and more complex self-sustaining reactions until we have a very complex reaction that we call life.
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