How did life on Earth begin? Well, there are a few hypotheses.In the beginning, for example, there's the 6-day theory. Then came the Aristotle and his readily observable truths that flies came from decaying matters and that crocodiles came from rotting logs and so on. Then - fast forward a few hundred years - in Soviet Russia, primordial soup creates you.
But now, some scientists say we owe life on Earth on a white smoker (no, not that one though arguably he was old enough to have been the first living thing on this planet):
Scientists, disenchanted with an 80 year old theory that life began in a "primordial soup," are focusing on deep-sea pressure cookers that were unknown just a couple of decades ago. Life may wemall have begun in tiny "chimneys" in a green rock that is common on earth, as well as other celestial bodies, when the ocean was 100 times more acidic than it is today, and the planet was much warmer.
Serpentine, California's official state rock, is on center stage today as a possible major player in generating the first life on Earth, more than 3.8 billion years ago.
This green stone, which looks a lot like jade, could have been a "rich incubator" of the unicellular life that first flooded the earth so long ago, according to geophysics professor Norm Sleep of Stanford University. Sleep didn't invent the idea of serpentine as an incubator, but he set out to learn if the theorizing of biologists could survive a geological inquiry. Were the geological conditions of early Earth compatible with life originating in serpentine?
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