Recently, scientists from various fields of science have come together and have compiled a unique model of when and how the first life appeared on Earth.
How the first organic compounds learned to create copies of themselves and thereby laid the foundation for reproductive life remains perhaps the biggest mystery in modern science. Chemistry, biology, geology and even astronomy are trying to answer this question, but for each of the aspects of the phenomenon of life, you need to get a lot of the most diverse information. What chemical process led to the transformation of inanimate nature into living organisms? Did it happen in one place or did it happen all over the place? Where did life originate - in the upper layers of the ocean or at the bottom, near geothermal springs?
Joint work of scientists is the key to success
A study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has brought the world of science closer to answering these questions. An article prepared by researchers from the Institute of Astronomy. Max Planck, Germany, and McMaster University, Ontario, combine existing biological, astronomical, geological and chemical models to predict how and when life began on Earth.
New research once again confirms two of the most popular theories to date regarding the origin of life on our planet. Firstly, the initial "building blocks" for the formation of living organisms on the young Earth were simply absent and ended up on the planet together with meteorites that fell on it quite often - the formation of the Solar System by the standards of space at that time was completed only recently, and meteorite activity in she was still very large. Scientists nicknamed the second hypothesis "a small warm pond". The bottom line is that meteorites, acting on small bodies of water with warm or hot water, ultimately created self-replicating RNA molecules - the first examples of organic life.
Small Warm Pond on Earth Today: Bumpass Hell Trail in Lassen Volcano National Park in California. This is how the reservoirs looked like in which life was born.
One of the most surprising details of the new study, which combines the achievements of scientists from so different areas of science, is that life, in their opinion, began incredibly early. This happened when the Earth had just cooled down to such a state that stable and shallow reservoirs with heated water could exist on it. For comparison, all previous studies suggest that for some half a billion years, life on the young Earth simply could not take root, much less begin to develop.
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“To find out the origin of life, we need to understand what the Earth looked like billions of years ago,” says Thomas Henning of the Institute of Astronomy. Max Planck. “As our research shows, astronomy in this case is an important part of the answer to this question. Some details of the formation of the solar system directly influenced the emergence of life on our planet."
Life on Earth came from space
Unfortunately, the exact chemical process that served as the catalyst is still unknown. However, scientists suspect that warm and periodically drying reservoirs have created ideal conditions for protein life. Nucleobases are nitrogenous bases, which are the protein building blocks of nucleic acids, including RNA and DNA, and which are still found in meteorites, thanks to the latter, they got into water around the world. Apparently, at some point, their concentration became sufficient for RNA to receive resources for self-reproduction.
Schematic representation of the factors affecting "warm ponds" and the chemicals they contain during the "wet" and "dry" phases of the cycle: ingress of interplanetary dust particles, drying, re-deposition, hydrolysis of more complex molecules to basic organic "building blocks", etc..d.
If the new model is correct, then this research plays a huge and very important role for all modern science. This is the first time in history when disparate models from different fields of science were combined into one to study abiogenesis, as a result of which they formed a surprisingly coherent picture of how life appeared on our planet. It also gives astronomers and cosmobiologists hope: if meteorites led to the emergence of life on our planet, then in other systems, celestial bodies included in the Goldilocks zone can also become the cradle of life - even if it will be different from what we are used to. It turned out that the most ancient processes of the formation of a stellar system and the distribution of chemical elements over a huge region filled with cosmic dust around a young star play a key role in understandinghow life could appear on a separate piece of cooling stone and nowhere else (at least, according to the latest data - the real picture may become clearer over time and be even more interesting).
This is where the activities of scientists only begin. The next step is to conduct experiments to test the theoretical part of the model. If scientists really manage to reproduce the processes of abiogenesis, then a person will literally become like God and, finally, will receive an answer to the most important question of his whole life.
Vasily Makarov
