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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So personally I don’t find this so mysterious, here’s my hypothesis. It was an unlikely event yes, but if you know biochemistry, which is just electromagnetism applied to molecules (duh not really but…), you will know that certain molecules bind electromagnetically to other molecules because of the way they are shaped and what they are made of (which atoms). Molecules can be large and complex, like proteins, and the other molecules they bind to can be small or large, as long as they are electromagnetically compatible. So far so good.
The thing is that when a molecule binds to another molecule, that changes the electromagnetical property of the whole. You kind of can see this effect if you have ever played with those small magnetic balls and you put them together in various shapes.
Ok, that’s the setup. Now imagine, in the primordial soup of organic molecules, created by mixing and matching smaller molecules, some on its own, some by external force, such as lightning, a molecule of some complexity happened to be created by these natural electromagnetic forces.
This particular molecule happened to be so formed by chance, that electromagnetically, it attracted and bound to itself smaller molecules, that piece by piece formed a replica of itself, one piece here and one piece there. These smaller molecules, which must have existed in abundance in the soup by then, could only attach themselves, electromagnetically compatible, to the place in the “mother” molecule, where they had a twin piece, and small molecule by small molecule, this created a replica of the mother molecule, attached to it.
And here’s the kicker: as the last small molecule “clicked” into place, the sum total of the electromagnetic forces now made the two identical parts split, or at least become so loosly attached, that it split easily due to external forces.
Now you have a mother and a child molecule, identical, that can repeat the process. Which was just what happened, and very soon, and exponentially, the soup was full of these self replicating molecules.
Once the soup was a bit full of these 1st gen self replicaters and the smaller “food” molecules were becoming more scarce, evolutionary mechanisms would kick in. Probably some of the replicaters changed its molecular structure a little (so a “mutation”) by happenstance so that it could cannibalise other replicators for parts (had stronger electromagnetic attraction at that part), then in turn some got a change that attached a non-replicating part to the whole (precursor of cell walls/defense) etc etc.
From there it’s just evolution, but from earlier than a cell, much earlier.
This is speculative of course, but you asked what I think and I think this is one of the more plausible explanations, imho.
Not quite. But some of the building blocks of life has been recreated in a lab by simulating the natural circumstances ( such as the right chemicals and electricity from lightning and all that)
And some of the first parts have been showing up.
Essentially life comes from. Chemicals bonding and then it begins to form self assembling molecules that makes up – via a longer process, the RNA that evolved into DNA.
So the very first life came from chemicals.
The first cell is theorized to have come from a proto-living entity. Something that was close to life, but didn’t quite meet the definition. Sort of like how a virus almost behaves like a living thing, but technically isn’t.
If you get the ingredients together in the right conditions, they can start various chemical reactions that interact in increasingly complex ways, until you end up with life.
Haven’t you read the Bible? The real Explain Like I’m Five from 5000 years ago is that God did it. Because humans are inherently lazy and back then we were fairly unaware too. It’s notable that they more or less got the order of operations right, in terms of creation.
1. Darkness and light: stars forming
2. Waters and land separated: geology of Earth
3. Plants made
4. Sun and moon and stars: ok, the order is a bit off.
5. Animals made: Little did they know, they were early scientists explaining evolution.
6. Humans made: they were off by a few days or millions of years, but who’s counting.
7. NFL
The geology of Earth likely had a lot to do with the real answer. It’s kinda like baking a cake: you can put all of the ingredients together all you want, but to get a cake you have to have energy added to those ingredients. So hydrothermal vents and water and a little electrical shock and boom: single cell organism
More on the primordial soup idea:
Starting with just atoms and adding any combination of heat, time, pressure/vacuum you can end up with simple molecules. Water (H2O). Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Methane(CH4). Ammonia(NH3). These are all very simple molecules that show up everywhere in the observable universe. Given more time, heat, pressure, maybe add in a little lightning and these can interact to form more complex molecules. Even amino acids. Given more time, amino acids can start to interact into self replicating molecules. Simple self replicating molecules can evolve. Those that are better at self replicating, make more copies of themselves. And so life evolved from these self replicating molecules getting better and better at self replicating.
For more, read up about the Miller-Urey experiment. They combined those simple molecules like ammonia, water, and methane with temperature and electricity(lightning) to show they could spontaneously creat simple amino acids.
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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