• Question: hoe did life start?

    Asked by anon-182761 on 25 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 25 Jun 2018:


      This is one of ‘the’ questions to be answered. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and we believe that life would have been able to arise around 3.5 billion years ago. Thats much earlier than dinosaurs which lived about 250 million years ago.

      Young Earth would have had very hot surfaces temperatures and molten rocks. It gradually cooled allowing water vapour to become liquid water causing the first rain, lakes, rivers and oceans. Various chemicals in these hot pools could react together to form new compounds- like the ones essential for life like sugars, amino acids and DNA. This allowed for more complex living things to be formed within a primordial soup. Later, some of these living things would have mutated and evolved even further to be able to live on land, eventually leading to live as we know it today.

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 29 Jun 2018:


      There is loads to read on how life came out of a primordial soup of bacteria that existed on an early Earth and that life now looks the way it is because of evolution. But, evolution and the idea of millions of bacteria struggling to survive is a quite aggressive, competitive way of life starting and developing on Earth, it is often left unsaid that the ‘modern’ plant and animal cells that make up every living thing couldn’t exist without co-operation. It wasn’t until 2 types of bacteria formed together and worked together that complex multi-cellular life could form. You could say, life wouldn’t exist without the ability to co-operate!

Comments