TO HUNT DOWN THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

To put into perspective, forasmuch as it took humans 10000 years to, for the first time, work up the first civilization, the advent in space science of ours has also rolled in for roughly 200 years.

6 min readApr 1, 2022

In fierce contrast to every religious stance, which perceives life as The Creator’s bestowal, scientists hold that we might have evolved from a “primordial soup”, or every other eccentric theory…

1. The Primordial Soup

To date, many still are not convinced by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Nevertheless, to date further back in time and delve deeper into the core, the origin of life, instead, must have been violently controversial.

Zeroing in the case, scientists have put forward quite a number of “prerequisites” of life [1].

In accordance with the very interpretation of the “habitable zone” concept, the Earth must have been “bestowed” with an any less suitable location, neither too far from the Sun to be quelled by ice, nor too close to get endeavored by the Borbdingnagian’s unbearable heat. Temperature, instead of water, has been the most critical factor to sprout life.

Second, we hurt for the energy to metabolize. Again, fortunately enough, the Sun provides a handsome amount of energy for photosynthesis in addition to the inherent source from redox reactions. Also, we crave nitrogen to form amino acids. Crucial as it might seem to respiration, oxygen does not directly catalyze life, and instead, shoulders the formation of complex life forms.

Last but not least, it seems any less vital that there exists no “terminator of life”. To demonstrate, even though it is an Earth-like exoplanet, that Kepler 186-f orbits a red dwarf has cripplingly burdened itself with radiation from solar flare. In a like manner, given that the first life form was microorganisms resistant to ultraviolet rays and ionizing radiation, a little intense sunlight can inflict skin cancer to humans [- the not-that-primitive-life-form].

Again, I emphasize that we have been woefully fortunate to thrive on a “primely located” planet that satisfies every aforementioned prerequisites. Sheer luck, nonetheless, does rarely address another paradoxicality since the beginning: how could organic life evolve from inorganic matters?

Many a hypotheses have been put forth, and the most preeminent of which has been the Spontaneous generation [2], holding that earthly creatures naturally pop up irregardless of similar structural predecessors. Accordingly, should we wrap the cheese in a cloth and leave it in a dark corner, rats will pop up out of nowhere, akin to the way maggots are “naturally” born on rotten food.

Autogenesis, together with the very belief that the Sun revolved around the Earth, was once a raging stance until the nineteenth century, as Louis Pasteur cut those down to size with his acclaimed swan neck flask experiment [3]. Accordingly, he evidenced that unless the broth in the jar was exposed to and contaminated by the air, microorganisms could not “naturally” spring.

By 1953, two UChicago chemists — Harold Urey and his disciple Stanley Miller — also carried out another any less classic experiment [4], and yielded any less mind-boggling results. Using a mixture of warm water, vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a glass vessel with electrodes on top, they simulated the primitive Earth atmospheric conditions. After cycles of boiling — evaporation — condensation, they obtained quite an amount of amino acids — the primary life element — without any organism or organic matter getting involved. Staggeringly enough, among the amount of generated amino acids, there were such acids capable of producing proteins as glycine and α-Alanine.

That said, the Urey — Miller experiment did NOT accurately simulate the genuine primitive Earth atmospheric conditions [5]. Still, it did show a myriad and diversity in the possibility of generating life from chemical compounds. The experiment also serves as a critical evidence to back another hypothesis on the origin of life — the so-called Primordial Soup constructed by the British scientist J.B.S Haldane and Russian biologist Aleksandr Oparin by the 1920s [6].

They both asserted that simple organic molecules had emerged from the interactions between substances and energy sources in different forms. They, accordingly, little by little accumulated to constitute the “soup pot” of the primitive life ingredients — through further processes of reaction and transformation, life has eventually shaped up.

2. … and every universal “spices”

After all, the Primordial Soup has been a pure theory, thus running into many objections. During the following decades, science and biology have unceasingly made great leaps. We have since been capable of zooming deeper into the cell’s internal, and constituting the very models of woefully convoluted organic structures, such as proteins, DNA and RNA.

Nevertheless, those advents have also invigorated the vexed question on the origin of life.

Insofar as humans have grasped most of what taking place throughout the life cycle; we still are heedless of how it all started. Knowing all too well the pollination and fruitfulness of plants, cell division — as what having been taught as a common knowledge, and the causes and progression of diseases — as what we are in control of; we still are woefully unmindful of how life actually came into being.

Until the dawn of space science. After all, it has been the steps on that dreary deep space surrounding us that reveals the most about the origin of life.

Years into now, space missions have not only polished up our meagre perception of the universe, but also every “sample of life” [7] — universal organic matter, or even amino acids from planets, meteorites, comets, even the cosmic dust omnipresent in this universe.

Over the 4 billion years of subsistence, our planet has oftentimes collided with meteorites [8]. As poles apart with the notorious Chicxulub [9], which ceased dinosaurs to exist and put an end to the predominance of giant reptiles, previous collisions, in all likelihood, must have brought every pivotal material of life onto the Earth [10]. Even the Earth has “welcomed” meteors containing up to 80 kinds of amino acids; it is much more than the combination of 20 amino acids that make up our human proteins [11].

Subsequently, the crippling impacts from which must have scattered these materials across the planet, eventually ending up in Urey-Miller-experiment-like reactions. We, thus, can portray those collisions as the nature having added “spices” to the boiling primordial soup pot — the very last step to wrap up the masterchief dish — life.

Having homed in on the stars, scientists have recently discovered the existence of another universal “primordial soup”. Under the deep sea ice of Enceladus, the moon, withal Saturn’s sixth largest satellite, scientists have ferreted out the presence of complicated organic molecules [12].

Accordingly, monomeric substances have been disclosed as carbon-rich saturated molecules, which, albeit poles apart from the metabolites, amino acids and nucleotides of modern life, is chemically fairly similar to simple lipids — which is set to produce more complicated organic molecules through chemical interactions — in a woefully remote future.

We, thus, have pro tempore caught on a clue, even when such a thing may spearhead more questions. This clue, nonetheless, is not merely to exalt human civilization and every other earthly life; but also to alleviate our forlornness in this grand universe. To date, the Drake equation that describes the probability of estimating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way (Drake equation) [13] could yield an any less ambiguous result. That said, upon ferreting out the mathematical relationship between a Brobdingnagian and a Lilliputian, it seems as though life is actually emerging from those half-done formulas.

To all appearances, what we are woefully hurting for is time. To put into perspective, forasmuch as it took humans 10000 years to, for the first time, work up the first civilization, the advent in space science of ours has also rolled in for roughly 200 years — which seems all too little to either trace our primordial universal relatives, or count on any of which to seek us.

For the time being, every scientific theory on the origin of life has been “austere”, thus woefully inferior to every other “senile” theory our ancestors had come up with millennia aforetime.

Insofar as scientists are overindulging themselves in every vague theoretical-physics-derived formula, meagre gathered universal matters and unripe biochemical systems theory, they have come up with merely ubiquitous, general anticipations and erroneous work. Which, thus, has got on others’ human nerves, costing every interest of theirs.

On the other hand, by buying ourselves into the “fact” that “God creates everything”, things will appear any less straightforward, nor will it cost us any more valiant effort.

But who, after all, brought God into being?

The Creator — another God with a longer name?

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References:

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/.../140625-kepler.../

[2] https://www.britannica.com/science/spontaneous-generation

[3] https://www.thoughtco.com/spontaneous-generation-4118145

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/.../primordial-soup...

[6] https://www.britannica.com/science/abiogenesis#ref301296

[7] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/45/2/2.8/240158

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829962/