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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To begin, we have no idea how life originated. We have several theories, many of which seem varying degrees of plausible.
Of course, many people on this planet believe that life was created by some form of a god. Personally I don’t agree with this view, but to each their own.
Science offers up a few other possible options. The most likely of which is what is known as “primordial soup” – basically a kind of sludge that may have formed on very very early earth (maybe even before it finished cooling from a molten state) that contained every kind of amino acid, the basic building blocks of life. Over time through chemistry these amino acids eventually came together to form the first archea, a life form similar to and a precursor to bacteria.
Another slightly less plausible solution (IMO) is something called panspermia. Yes, sperm is the root of that word. The concept is that early life formed somewhere else, and then caught a ride on a meteor to earth, “seeding” the planet with life.
No matter what, there is no definitive answer to your question. This happened at least 3 billion, more like 4 billion years ago. It’s going to take a long time before we can answer this question for certain, if ever, as basically none of those geological records still exist.
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