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 eli5 (non-religious) version of this starts with the fact that the simplest form of life is much simpler than you might think.
Even things like bacteria have had millions upon millions of years to grow in complexity from the origin point of life, which really requires only something that can a) copy itself, even if only imperfectly and b) stay together long enough to make that copy.
There are many theories of exactly how life might have started on earth – with simple RNA or DNA, for instance, or with other cell components — but the basic idea is that the chemical components of life were found in abundance bumping around and eventually combined in just the right waym.
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