What is the Origin of life on Earth?

Understanding how life originated on Earth has been an obsession for scientists of all ages.

Among the different theories, on the one hand, are those that explain the origin of life on Earth as a result of divine creation.

On the other hand, there are those who say that life was born from a soup in the primitive terrestrial oceans, where something as complex and extraordinary as life was formed from atoms that made up inert matter. A self-sustaining chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

Throughout history, human beings have answered this question from various fields:

Among them we can find in the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras some considerations, which although far from the modern vision of Panspermia, refer to the arrival of microscopic material on Earth from outer space.

Later we find those who wonder: How is it possible that something so complex arises from inert matter in that period of time? And their answer is that this is not possible, and they propose that life came from outside the Earth, aboard asteroids, meteorites or comets that seeded the primeval oceans, advocating the Panspermia Theory or Cosmic Seeding.

Another of the great questions is about the way in which inorganic matter is capable of generating organic matter, that is, how life can arise from inanimate processes. Much less is known with certainty how complex organs such as the human brain, which has managed to produce around 70 billion neurons, have arisen.

In this sense, some theories suggest that our brain, the most complex in the universe, developed from small changes that were produced by the pressure of the environment and the need for survival of those first hominids that populated the planet. But this has not been enough to explain why we have become such a technologically advanced society and managed to generate so much cultural diversity.

In the 1950s, two American biochemists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, tried to simulate conditions regarding what the early atmosphere of our planet was like. With this, they sought to determine the way in which the first organisms emerged from a spontaneous process.

For their experiment, Miller and Urey designed a tube that contained most of the gases that were present in that early atmosphere. Later, they developed a pool of water that mimicked the early ocean. Then, they bombarded those gases with an electrical current that simulated lightning. This, for a week. Finally, they analyzed the contents of the liquid pool.

To their surprise, they came to the conclusion that several organic amino acids formed spontaneously, from the simple inorganic materials that they had worked with all that time.

This important test, along with biological, chemical and geological evidence, has contributed to creating a more detailed map of how life on Earth originated, which was apparently spontaneous.

One of the most important qualities that a human being possesses is divergent thinking, which leads us to try to decipher the incomprehensible, and in this sense, we find the theories of directed or direct Paspermia as we explained previously, through this approach, microorganisms they were dropped into the primeval ocean and began to multiply. An eccentric approach, but which is reached as a consequence of the high knowledge of the genetic code, and paradoxes about RNA and its structure.

Perhaps it is something intrinsic to the human being, something that is written in their brain structure, those temporal lobes somewhat more developed than other hominid species, which leads us to try to understand what we do not know, which leads us to explore the field of the unexplained and to ask ourselves about issues like this.

A new theory proposes that life may have originated from a chemical compound that led to the formation of the first DNA molecules.

A team of scientists from the Scripps Research Center in the United States, found a chemical compound, diamidophosphate, that would explain how the blocks of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), also called deoxynucleotides, came together. This gave rise to the formation of the first primordial DNA strands which, in turn, allowed the origin of organisms on Earth.

The discovery has taken years of research, and some of the most relevant things that those who participated in this have observed is that diamidosphosphate serves better when the letters of the deoxynucleotides are not the same, that is, when the letters ACGT (Adenine, Cytosine,

A team of scientists from the Scripps Research Center in the United States, found a chemical compound, diamidophosphate, that would explain how the blocks of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), also called deoxynucleotides, came together. This gave rise to the formation of the first primordial DNA strands which, in turn, allowed the origin of organisms on Earth.

The discovery has taken years of research, and some of the most relevant things that those who participated in this have observed is that diamidosphosphate serves better when the letters of the deoxynucleotides are not the same, that is, when the letters ACGT (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine) are scrambled, for example A and T or G and T.

The most revealing thing about the finding is that DNA and RNA (Ribonucleic Acid) had a common origin and, according to this new hypothesis, they arose from the same chemical reactions. This also means that the first life forms arose from a mixture of DNA and RNA.

From this, the researchers seek to develop a chemical model that can lead to a better understanding of the emergence of more complex organisms such as plants, animals and humans.

According to scientists, the known Universe was formed approximately 14,000 million years ago, there is evidence that the Earth was formed approximately 4,600 million years ago and that 1,100 million years after its formation there were already bacteria on its surface as has been recorded in the stromatolites, layers of fossilized cyanobacteria. Which means that, at some point in those 1,100 million years, life manifested on Earth.

Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died in 1996, once said that "we are stardust." Therefore, human beings, we are actually the product of a long evolutionary process in which that stellar matter became increasingly complex until it was able to see itself reflected through our own consciousness. In other words, the universe sees itself reflected through us.

Knowing that Panspermia refers to a Greek word whose meaning refers to the Seed or the Origin of Everything. As a result of this analysis, we can conclude with the available data that the theory of Interstellar or Interplanetary Panspermia which is based on the hypothesis that life on Earth comes from Outer Space, either through contact with extraterrestrial material such as comets or Meteorites, which would carry the seeds of life by way of cosmic seeding from the primitive oceans or through intelligently directed seeding by an extraterrestrial civilization, may have happened and is happening in the universe we know, and is more common than what we can think of. Therefore life on Earth could arise or be catalyzed by the massive arrival of meteorites with life or with precursors of life.