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He suggested that the chemical steps towards life are still being taken in the ponds today, but that anything produced would be instantly palatable and so eaten before it could develop any further. Darwin recognized this as a problem for his ‘warm little pond’ hypothesis, which blindly assumed that Earth’s environment had always been largely the same throughout its existence. Today, the only way in which life is created is through biological reproduction it is not spontaneously forming around us, so the conditions life first formed under must have been utterly different from those of today. Known as stromatolites they are pillow-shaped communities of bacteria that grow rather like a coral reef. The first fossils are found in rocks from Western Australia dating back 3.5 billion years ago. The indication is an enrichment of the lightest stable carbon isotope, carbon-12, which life uses preferentially because it can pass more easily through cell membranes. Scientists find the first evidence for life in rocks dating from just 100 million years after the bombardment stopped.
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Nothing could seem more opposed to the development of fragile biological molecules, yet intriguingly the evidence suggests that life began soon after the late bombardment began to tail off 3.9 billion years ago. The late bombardment created hellish conditions on the Earth: melting the crust, throwing molten rocks into the atmosphere, and evaporating fledgling oceans.
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However this gentle scenario may be a long way from the truth. present, so that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes’. In 1871, Charles Darwin wrote a letter in which he described life’s origin as taking place in a ‘warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. Phosphorus and sulphur are found in the rocks too. Oxygen is the most abundant, making up nearly half the mass of our planet, most of it bound into the rocks rather than the atmosphere. Life on Earth is based on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. This ‘late bombardment’ began 4.6 billion years ago and lasted approximately 700 million years bringing water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia to the planets. To tackle the problem of how life began on Earth, we need to go back to the final stages of the planet’s formation, when it was pummelled with asteroids and comets. Somehow during Earth’s history, the chemicals of stardust have grouped themselves together in such a way that living systems have evolved. Yet understanding how this stardust has been processed into living organisms is one of the thorniest questions in science.Īll the elements we find on Earth, with the possible exception of hydrogen, were created by nuclear fusion inside the cores of stars. Consider the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen that you breathe – all those atoms are older than our home planet and were forged inside a massive star. Take a good look at it the atoms in that piece of jewellery are older than the entire Earth. The chances are that you are wearing a gold ring or some other adornment fashioned from a precious metal. Today I’d like to explore the question: Are we made of stardust? Stuart Clark, astronomy author and journalist. His website is and his Twitter account is sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by David Rossetter on behalf of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association: A goofy group of geeks who love to observe and share the night sky around New York State’s Mid-Hudson region. He is also a frequent contributor to newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes. Stuart is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Visiting Fellow of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and senior editor for space science at the European Space Agency.
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His next book is Big Questions: Universe, from which this podcast is adapted. His books include The Sun Kings, and the highly illustrated Deep Space, and Galaxy. Description: Where did the chemical elements that make up all living things come from?īio: Dr Stuart Clark is an award-winning astronomy author and journalist.