Life. Where did we come from?

Water is H₂O, two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, pulled together by covalent bonds. The air we breathe is a mix of countless particles, along with dust and water vapour. Then what is it that makes up life? What are the ingredients of our fundamental essence? And what is it that separated us nearly four billion years ago, and continues to separate us today, from everything else?.

Since the beginning

Though no doubt many individuals in the ancient world concerned themselves with these great questions, it was the Greeks from around the 7th century BC onwards who turned it into a viable career path. Many philosophers of the Greek world, the like of Epicurus, Lucretius, and Plato preoccupied themselves with where life came from. The overwhelming conclusion was that life begets life. But what of the first life? What begat that? In the 4th century BC, Aristotle concluded that living things arise spontaneously from non-living matter as long as that matter contained pneuma, or vital heat.

Spontaneously from decaying manure, insects sprang forth from the morning dew, and eels slithered newborn from nothing more than a wet ooze and rotting seaweed. Remarkable as this may seem to us now, Aristotle’s ideas of spontaneous generation dominated thinking on the origin of life for nearly 2,000 years. He was one of the scientists that followed in his footsteps, devising ever more complex recipes for higher forms of life. Like early 17th century Dutch scientist Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, who reasoned that a dirty shirt left in a bin with wheat germ for 21 days would spontaneously generate live mice. Over time though, the recipes for spontaneous life lost favor.

for the seemingly miraculous appearance of animals in old, abandoned heaps of dirt. But, for the smaller, enigmatic creatures, bacteria and weird, single-celled amoebas, spontaneous generation proved hard to disprove. Finally, in the 19th century, French biologist Louis Pasteur devised an experiment to exclude any outside influence from a flask full of inanimate matter, a vacuum. When the flask remained sterile, the concept of spontaneous generation was proved to be false. Matter alone could not make life after all. To this day, no laboratory has been able to pull life from its absence. Frankenstein remains a fiction. Life, and only life, has continued to beget life. And yet, we know today that the Earth formed more than 4 billion years ago without life. No living thing could have survived the convulsions of the Hadean Eon. But here we are today, on an Earth brimming with, overflowing with living beings of every imaginable form and function.

Conclusion

From the highest peaks to the deepest ocean depths, life thrives. So, it is abundantly clear, at some point between three to four billion years ago, matter did make life. The final act of spontaneous generation in history. The origin of life on Earth. The questions that remain are how, and from what. This question will remain unanswered many theories many explanation yet the correct one is still remain mysterious and will remain. Predicting the age of life and earth isn’t an easy task.