We know living things come from other living things. But how did the VERY FIRST living thing get here? Did it just pop out of nowhere? Can scientists make new life from scratch? If we took all the ingredients for life and put them on another planet, would life start there too after a long, long time?
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The basic theory (simplified for a 5 YO, amd of clurse this is only one theory) is this.
There were a bunch of different chemicals floating around the ocean, constantly being fed energy by the sun.
This caused a lot of chemical reactions.
Eventually, random combinations made some chemicals that made copies of themselves out of simpler chemicals around them.
As time went on, random chance meant those chemicals varied a little when they copied themselves.
Some of those variations were better at copying themselves than others.
Over time, this created more and more complicated chemicals (or even groups of cooperating chemicals) that competed for simpler chemicals to copy themselves.
Once those reached a certain level of complexity, you’d call that the first living thing.
If you put all of the ingredients for the first life form on another planet, chances are not necessarily high that life would happen – but if you put them on millions of other planets and waited billions of years, we’d probably see life begin on one of them.
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