Question

How did life begin?

Answer 1

Answer:

Microbial life forms have been discovered on Earth that can survive and even thrive at extremes of high and low temperature and pressure, and in conditions of acidity, salinity, alkalinity, and concentrations of heavy metals that would have been regarded as lethal just a few years ago. These discoveries include the wide diversity of life near sea–floor hydrother­mal vent systems, where some organisms live essentially on chemical energy in the absence of sunlight. Similar environments may be present elsewhere in the solar system.

Under­standing the processes that lead to life, however, is complicated by the actions of biology itself. Earth’s atmosphere today bears little resemblance to the atmosphere of the early Earth, in which life developed; it has been nearly reconstituted by the bacteria, vegetation, and other life forms that have acted upon it over the eons. Fortunately, the solar system has preserved for us an array of natural laboratories in which we can study life’s raw ingredients — volatiles and organics — as well as their delivery mechanisms and the prebiotic chemical processes that lead to life. We can also find on Earth direct evidence of the interactions of life with its environments, and the dramatic changes that life has undergone as the planet evolved. This can tell us much about the adaptability of life and the prospects that it might survive upheavals on other planets.

Answer 2

Answer:

Four billion years ago, something started stirring in the primordial soup. A few simple chemicals got together and made biology – the first molecules capable of replicating themselves appeared. We humans are linked by evolution to those early biological molecules. But how did the basic chemicals present on early Earth spontaneously arrange themselves into something resembling life? How did we get DNA? What did the first cells look like? More than half a century after the chemist Stanley Miller proposed his “primordial soup” theory, we still can’t agree about what happened. Some say life began in hot pools near volcanoes, others that it was kick-started by meteorites hitting the sea.

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