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How Did Life On Earth Start?

Did life on Earth start due to meteorites splashing into warm little ponds? Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists. Their calculations suggest that wet and dry cycles bonded basic molecular building blocks in the ponds' nutrient-rich broth into self-replicating RNA molecules that constituted the first genetic code for life on the planet. Source 6s.

Start Earth Life How

I could never get my head around all this biology coming from explosions it just doesn't make sense to me.

How Did Life On Earth Start? UFO & Writing Art Education Sciences

Its all chemistry at the core. There are all kinds of molecules that form self replicating patterns in their environment without being alive at all. Gemstones being among the more common, viruses are another.

It has already been shown that the right environs paired with a little external energy forms the basic compounds at the core of all life. Not all of the steps between that and the first things we would recognize as being alive are well understood, but we'll get there.

Start Earth Life How

I can see maybe something microscopic starting to move around because of that combination but all the life on the earth with the millions of different species I mean its way too complex and evolved.

Start Earth Life How

Don't forget about the time scales involved, and I don't just mean the billions of years involved since the start.

A lot of single celled organisms have a generational time of under thirty minutes. In an experiment, it took microbes 40 generations to respond to stress and develop distinct features in one population but not others that can be passed on to future generations. So just 20 hours to develop a distinct evolutionary path. If we assume each path splits into 2 more, then in ten generations, just eight days, you get over 1,000 distinct variations. Twenty generations, 16 days, and it balloons up to over a million.

Now, this is an absurd simplification, not all of those branches will survive, let alone spawn more branches. In addition, generations get longer as you move into more complex organisms, which slows the process down.

But even with those considerations, that should give you an idea of how fast things can diversify.

Edited: daishain on 5th Oct, 2017 - 5:26am

How Did Life On Earth Start?

And this is why it's great to have an engineer on the site. You made this so simple to understand even I can understand it. So, in the beginning do you think diversification was happening at this rate, with some few surviving and many more leading to dead ends? Even if a huge percentage led to dead ends the few that remained would then diversify themselves.

How Life Earth Start

This isn't my field, but is what I've always expected, and yes, I think that there's a huge rate of dead ends cropping up. Heck, I'd be surprised if anything more than 5% of possible splits pan out in the long run.

But that's the thing about exponential growth, that kind of attrition rate doesn't slow it down much in the long run.

Edited: daishain on 5th Oct, 2017 - 2:08am

How Life Earth Start Sciences Education Art Writing & UFO

Right, 5% of a huge number is till a huge number and when that 5% generates the exponential growth that it will it leads to tremendous growth, even though only 5% of that growth remains. I would guess that as the organisms become more mature they also become more viable and that 5% survival rate creeps up as the length of time between generations increases.