and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
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There’s no strict difference between life and any other cyclic chemical processes.
What we call “life” is just an overly complicated chemical cycle
You have the answer in the Bible. Any other rational explanation goes in pseudoscience which is faith based, not facts based. There are no scientific proofs of making organ matery from unorganic. It is impossible. https://youtu.be/ZQh7YqjMEeE
To cut the answer short, no one knows for sure. Yes, we have things like the “soup” theory, but that’s the thing, it’s just a theory. You also have the hydrothermal vent hypothesis which advocates argue explains some aspects of cellular function that aren’t reconciled by the primordial soup theory. All in all, which a bit of research, you will find there are a few theories which have their strengths and weaknesses but as stated earlier, no science has yet to claim a definitive answer.
Basically it’s Chemistry.
It can under circumstances that can ( and does) happen in nature, form the bonds that are the precessors for life.
While we haven’t created life artificially yet. Scientists are slowly getting there.
Some molecules tend to create more copies of themselves. This is just chemistry. The molecules are not alive, but if they exist then their structure tends to cause other atoms to arrange themselves in a similar way.
These new molecules are not exact copies. There is variant A, variant B, variant C, etc. Some copies tend to cause the creation of even more copies of themselves. Maybe variant F had a shell of atoms that made the molecule survive longer before falling apart, which gave it more time to make copies.
Some time later variant FFAJJ is able to use energy from the sun to make even more copies.
At some point,the molecule does a sufficient number of things that we declare it to be alive.
At which point is it alive? What does it even mean to be alive? This is a hard question to answer, you can define life but there will always be edge cases. Is a virus alive? How about a prion?
Up to a point, it’s just natural chemistry — bigger molecules forming by the combination of smaller molecules. Especially for polymers, molecules that form in chains, chunk by chunk by chunk. This is how nylon is made, nothing special there.
But the key step was how to replicate a molecule, make a copy of a molecule that’s laying around. This is doable if you have catalyst molecules also laying around to help that process.
But the bazinga moment was a molecule that was a catalyst for its own replication. This happened to be RNA, most biologists think. From then on, it’s a downhill coast.
You fall into the deep unknown, a question that has consumed the thoughts of pretty well everyone at some point, and some of us think about it a lot.
The biggest problem is really and truly understanding the difference between “life” and “not-life”. Both life and not-life are basically chemical reactions, mechanistically (as the way they work in detail). Life does not “exist” solely because of the functions of life, is the idea. Making the same chemical processes occur does not make a thing come to life, as far as we can tell. Or are the operations of systems, even such as the earth system (“Gaia”), a “type” of life and we fail to recognize it?
So, what is it about the chemical systems that makes it self-perpetuating, driven to self-preserve (whatever that actually means), and (at some level or other) possess awareness of self even if only in a very weak and tiny way?
The answer is that we do not know.
The chemistry aspect is not all that problematic in basic idea although not all that easy to make happen in practice. There are numerous ways that chemistry can result in the components required for life. We find the “building blocks” of life in some of the most surprising places. The stuff needed for life as we know it is made by chemical reactions, not-life reactions, in particular circumstances. Those circumstances may not be common but they do exist, some a lot more than others. Life-needed chemicals get made without life, at least in some places at some times. This does not lead directly to life though.
It is the step from inorganic (not-life) chemistry to biological activity (“life”) that is the great unknown.
We don’t actually know what life is, is the basic point. We understand the mechanics, but not the “spark”. Every living human (if not other animals) has some belief as to what that “spark” is. It has never been observed directly though, at least not verifiably.
Perhaps it is truly an emergent property, not something that exists except when the total system combines and then makes something that is more than the sum of the parts.
The virus issue is actually proof of the point. Viruses are alive but not really. They are in that midpoint between life and not-life. Sort of alive, but not really, depending on how you wish to define life.
We don’t know yet how the first life on earth came to be.
But for 4500million years on earth there were no life. So its likely quite rare (or the conditions werent right for it during that first timeperiod).
Many experiments have been done to try and replicate conditions as they were on earth before life evolved, sofar none has born any fruit yet.
The simple answer: if you have an infinite amount of matter and an infinite amount of time, literally anything you can think of will eventually be created spontaneously. While time and matter in our universe may not be infinite, we are working with incredibly large numbers in both aspects. Life took billions of years to happen. Over those billions of years, every atom on Earth (1.3 x 10^50) was interacting with the atoms around it at a rate of many times a second, for BILLIONS of years. Now obviously only a certain percentage of those atoms was in an appropriate range and environment to potentially create the building blocks for life, but the number of at bats that those countless molecules got is absolutely staggering. So, it was just random chance that life was created, but there was a ridiculous amount of opportunities for that to happen.
>does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
Absolutely. Biological creatures are basically just extremely advanced machines. One day, we will be able to create anything we want or could possibly imagine from biological engineering. We are still a long way away from that though. Nature has a couple billion year head start on us.
Short term answer Abiogenesis longer answer we have theories but nothing truly concrete we know that bacteria or closest thing to it existed first an are chemical soup from ocean volcanic vents then spread and spread till one figured out photosynthesis but that’s life already started so before that we don’t know what weird circumstances occurred to create life from non life
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