We cannot travel to the past to see how life began on Earth. All we can do is to speculate and hypothesize. Some scientists tried to recreate the prehistoric past when life was non-existent and the earth had just started cooling down. Stanley Miller, an American chemist, conducted many experiments in this regard and tried to prove how life came into existence.
Miller conducted an experiment in 1953, which shed light on the sprouting of life on Earth. He filled a laboratory flask with a mixture of gases.
These gases were similar to those that made up the atmosphere of the earth billions of years ago. He then fired electrical sparks through the gases for a week. The electrical sparks had the same effect on the gases in the flask that bolts of lightning had on the earth’s atmosphere before the appearance of life.
The results were revelatory. Miller discovered that a variety of substances had formed in the flask, including amino acids and sugars, which are necessary for life to occur. From Miller’s experiment, scientists concluded that the fierce flashes of lightning that were common during the early days of the earth reacted with the gases in the atmosphere to produce the substances necessary for introducing life on Earth.
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