The Beginnings

How did we begin? Not just people of this generation, or the human race, but all of life's organisms. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, but life on Earth didn't begin for nearly a billion years later. There are a ton of hypothesises about the beginnings of life but I am going to cover the main ones.

Special Creation:
Life may have been placed on Earth by a divine being. This was the first hypothesis made by humans to explain our existance on Earth, whether by the God saying "let there be light" thing or something like that. This cannot be tested (yet), so there isn't much more to expand on with this creationism theory.

Extraterrestial Origin:
Life may not have even started on Earth. There is a possiblity that life may have been brought to Earth. I'm not talking about a UFO dropping off a bunch of animals on Earth. Instead this hypothesis is called panspermia, which suggests that when thousands of meteorites and comets slammed into early-Earth, they may have carried enough of the right organic molecules to kick-start life on this planet. This is testable, but has yet to be proven.

Spontaneous Origin:
Life is full of randomness, this much we know. But was this randomness enough to kickstart a primative earth is to life-overdrive? Maybe. This hypothesis suggests that a bunch of abiotic molecules turned into the building blocks of life. This could have happened in many of places under a lot of different condition yeilding different organic molecules. Whether it was in the sea foam of the ocean's edge, deep in the Earth's crust, within clay, at deep-sea, or somewhere else entirely. This probably happened in a reducing atmosphere, which we are not entirely aware of its exact composition. The debat among biologists is which type of molecules came first, proteins or RNA. This has been tested before with some inclusive results (google the Miller-Urey Experiment for more details on that).

All we know for certain is that something started our existance and here we are now. The next installment of this blog will cover where life went from here.



Early Molten Earth
(hthttp://internetlooks.com/earlyearth.jpg)

Present-day Earth
(http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/0/885/modis_wonderglobe_lrg.jpg)

This information is coming from BIOLOGY by Raven et al., 7th edition. (AP Biology Textbook) and my brain.



We are enormously significant

What makes us human?

What makes us human? Human is the name that we, as a species, have given ourselves. What makes us unique from the rest of the life on earth? It's a puzzling question that you may or may not have a guess to. Some people believe we were placed here on Earth by a divine being of some sort and made superior by divine will alone. I am not one of those people. I believe in the world I can see and can logically believe on my own, not what someone preaches at me. If you believe in evolution, one of the questions that arises (in my mind at least) is what makes us so special? What makes us so superior from the rest of the life on Earth that we can create and destroy on an enormous scale? Could life have favored reptilian creatures that, over time, evolved into sentience beings and left humans no more evolved than our ape relatives? This, I can only guess. Our future is just as muddled as our past. Will we, like many species have before us, gone extinct by famine, disease, or a catastrophic event? Or will we find a new planet to inhabit once ours is drained of all resources? This could become real problems that we will face during our lifetimes. On a more individual scale, what makes us different from everyone else? Why does everyone have a unique genetic makeup, finger-print, and can think independently, form opinions different from everyone around them, and question everything? We are, in short, amazing creatures.

 

I wish to exploit our uniqueness (or weirdness) through the world that we have created, the Internet. From the reason why we are attracted to different people to our evolution through time to where we are headed to in the future. Enjoy and keep thinking.