You must have wondered at some point or other how you popped into existence. Maybe your teacher. parent, friend, or your own mental investigation told you that everything is born from its parent. So. a calf is born to a cow, a kid is born to a goat, and so on, depending on the species. You may then have tumbled further and further in your mind’s tunnel of inquiry, and soon realised there had to have been an organism that took birth first. from which all of us, all races, species, and varieties of creatures proliferated and branched out. According to scientists, when space and matter (stars and dust) emerged out of the Big Bang, it carried in it the seeds of life, even though these were in themselves inanimate or non-living. Scientists have two main theories about how life began to form.
Abiogenesis…
is the scientific term for the study or process of how life came or comes into being. The word is formed from the Greek phonemes a (meaning non) bio (meaning life-related) genesis (meaning birth or origin). And it denotes the process by which biological creatures sprang out from non-living matter that was formed from interstellar dust. It explores how lifeforms emerge as a gradual recombination of carbon atoms with one another or hydrogen atoms. This occurs naturally as a chemical process forming organic compounds. As these organic compounds form increasingly multifaceted patterns and varieties of structures, they begin to acquire the complexity needed to harbour life All lifeforms are made of cells, each a piece that makes the jigsaw puzzle of an organism come to life, carry out the functions of respiration, movement, digestion, and reproduction. These complex structures form the necessary components for building the vessel for containing life. This is why another term for any loving creature is organisation we are all made of an organisation of atoms into molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.
Panspermia. means seeds spreading all over. This theory holds that basic lifeforms evolved on other celestial bodies and were transported across space via asteroid ricochets, become seeded on Earth after meteorite strikes, and resume breeding after adapting to the new habitable environment. This could be ‘directed panspermia, proposed by Nobel laureate Francis Crick and chemist Leslie Orgel, where intelligent beings supposedly deliberately dispatch lifeforms to spread life throughout the cosmos. Soft panspermia theory does not go as far as proposing that whole living organisms are transported through space, but only that the basic building blocks of life, such as amino acids, sugars, and the building blocks of RNA, are formed or moved through space. Scientists at MIT and Harvard are seriously exploring the likelihood of life having spread from Mars to Earth and vice versa. Greek philosopher Anaxagoras mentions ‘panspermia’ in 5th Century BC to evoke the idea of seeds travelling between planets.
Life is chemistry in the language of biology…
Simple organic compounds were formed very early on even in the prebiotic (before biological life) stages of evolution. All we needed was hydrogen and oxygen to combine for water vapour (the ultraviolet radiation energised this chemical reaction) and nitrogen, which is the key element in the formation of DNA and RNA, the heart of a cell.
Spontaneous origin
In ancient times, people thought life occurred by chance, when inanimate stuff decayed Microorganisms even today, such as bacteria and other microbes are known to sniff out a rotting piece of food and swarm all over it in an instant. But this did not explain how they developed Hoses and mouths, did it? By the 17th Century, a simple experiment disproved it-when Italian physicist Francesco Redi placed fresh meat in three jars, maggots came up only in two open jars, into which flies would have been able to lay eggs, and not in the sealed jar. In another experiment. French chemist Louis Pasteur found that life did not form around dead yeast cells kept in a pre-sterilised flask, but did when they were exposed to air.
Chumming the pot…
US chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey tried to simulate the conditions that would have existed in the prebiotic soup in the laboratory in 1952. They applied electrical discharges to a mixture of water vapour, methane, hydrogen and ammonia (all of these ingredients would have been present in the ancient soup) And they obtained simple amino acids, the building blocks of protein, which is the fundamental nutrient that forms muscles that help an organism move and grow As this years Chemistry Nobel-winners found, a coating of fat helps protect RNA and the other contents of a cell Oxygen, carbon and hydrogen would have bonded to form lipids, which would make the walls of a cell sturdy and safe. An organism then needs energy, which it gets through carbohydrates (no prizes for guessing which atoms make this happen).
Picture Credit : Google