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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There are conjectures that life is actually an energetically favorable way to capture the flow and accumulation of high energy compounds. Keep in mind that before there was “life”, any molecules that were produced by chemical or photochemical or electrochemical processes in the early earth would remain for thousands or millions of years, just accumulating in a puddle or lagoon or deep inside rocks or on the surface of clay particles. There were no bacteria or mold or bugs to chew them up, only other chemicals to bump into and sometimes react. There was a constant stream of energy flowing in from the sun, lots of methane and water, no oxygen to speak of. Or so we think. And immense amounts of time and millions of square miles of rock and millions of cubic miles of atmosphere, heat from vulcanism and electrical storms.
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