Primordial Soup

So, I decided to write a blog. I've got a fairly good idea of where I want it to go, and what I want to say in it, but absolutely no idea how to start it, cause just posting something out of the blue with no introduction seems a bit abrupt, but all introduction-y things I can think of seem too formal somehow, so if you could all read this as if you know what's happening, and what sort of stuff this is going to be about, that would be great. You don't of course, but you will soon. Hopefully. Hang on to your metaphorical hats. Unless you're wearing an actual hat. Then hold on to that.

I have no idea how life started on this planet. I've heard that it all happened in something called 'primordial soup', which I can only assume is a magma like mix of molten minerals, water and the like, but I have no idea what actually happened to make things change from being not alive to being alive. As far as I know, no-one else really knows either, but I assume that there are lots of people out there with a much better idea of it than me. For some reason, I've never actually done much research into it. Honestly, I think it's because I'm scared of what I might find out. Right at the core of my belief system is the belief that life as a whole is special, and that a very clear line can be drawn between things which are alive, and things which aren't, but I expect that if I ever had a look around the internet, all the evidence would point towards chemical reactions slowly becoming more and more complex until eventually they were life, without any way to pinpoint exactly where they became so. That frightens me a little. What's more, I really don't know what I want the answer to be, so I try not to think about it. It's not a very scientific viewpoint, nor one I'm proud of, but there you have it.

Nonetheless, one thing about the origin of life is clear to me; it was very, very lucky. Whatever it was that happened all those billions of years ago, as far as we can tell it hasn't happened again on Earth since, nor on any other planet we've been able to observe. In spite of this, there must be other planets somewhere out there in the sky with the potential to harbour life, whether or not (and I'm sure the answer for most, if not all is 'not') they actually have developed it. There are just too many stars and galaxies for there not to be many other places which fulfil the conditions, which, as far as I know, basically boil down to having sufficient mass to sustain an atmosphere, not being to close too a star, not being too far away from a star, and having water present. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that, but regardless, other planets which life could survive on must exist. Put this somewhere in the back of your head for a second, we'll be back to it later.

Okay, quick intermission. As you've probably all noticed, I clearly don't know much about anything I'm saying. This is because I don't know everything. What's more, I don't know many things. If you compared all the things I do know against all the things I don't know, the things I do know would show up as a statistical anomaly. Mathematically speaking, you should ignore them. It's one of my main goals in life to learn as much as I possibly can about the world around me, but for each thing I mention here, I can't possibly research properly, because each one is vast enough to easily fill a lifetimes worth of research. Also, I'm quite lazy. So for now, we're going to have to settle with assumptions, analogies and 'as far as I know's, the three 'A's of blogging. Yeah, I'm making up rules about blogging before I even finish my first post. Sue me.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I believe that life is incredibly special, which I hope to expand upon at sometime in the future, but for now, I'll leave it there. Also, as far as we know, our planet could be the only place in the universe where this life exists, which is bad, because in eight billion years, this planet is going to be swallowed up by the sun. Sure, it sounds like a long time away now, but I bet it'll come sooner than you think. I know by that time humanity will have long gone anyway, but it seems like a shame that the rest of life won't be able to live on past then. Except, I think that maybe it doesn't have to be. Although I generally see humanity as a bit of a dead end as far as evolution is concerned, maybe we can help to push forward life in ways other species cannot. Some of the species on this planet are incredibly resilient, for example, Deinococcus radiodurans, a species of bacteria able to withstand up to one thousand times more radiation than a human, by piecing back together the pieces of its shattered genome time and time again. This species, and many others with similarly amazing adaptation, could, I'm sure, colonise some of the previously mentioned life-support capable planets, but they have no possible way to reach them, so they're doomed to be consumed by the sun. However, surely we could build lots of tiny space vessels, fill them with various species of resilient bacteria, and send them off randomly into every corner of the sky, in the hope that one of them would reach somewhere it can found a population, and maybe, in eight billion years time, just as the Earth is being consumed, flora and fauna like life will begin to emerge on the new colonised planets. Surely it wouldn't be too expensive, we send things into space all the time, and it shouldn't require any propulsion once it leaves Earth's gravity.

My first assumption for a problem with this idea would be, considering the vast amount of time the arc would have to be floating through space, there's nothing we could possibly do to keep the bacteria alive the entire way, as food and other resources would eventually run out. However, technically the Earth is a closed system with finite resources, however since pretty much all of life, bar humans, lives in balance with the environment, the finite resources can sustain a limited population indefinitely. Furthermore, it is possible to make a bottle garden, a sealed bottle with plants inside, which can last indefinitely with a small amount of water and nutrients, as the plant population will quickly stabilise to form a perfect balance with the resources available. If small, lightweight and airtight bacterial bottle gardens could be perfected, they could be propelled into space in all directions, where eventually one of them might collide with a planet where the bacteria could colonise and eventually evolve into a more complex ecosystem, like the one we have on Earth today. There are plants which, once mature, grow seed pods which will swell to huge sizes, until they explode, scattering their progeny over the surrounding environment, which can grow to maturity themselves before releasing more exploding seed pods. Perhaps the intergalactic survival of life could work as a macrocosm of this; if a bacterial arc arrived on a planet, eventually through evolution, a civilised species like mankind could arise, which could create it's own arcs and release them into space, and so the process would go on, meaning that life would be able to far outlive the timespan of any single planet.

Of course, according to most theories, the universe is set to end at some point, and anyway, even if this process worked for a while, at some point it would likely fail, by pure chance of no arcs reaching an appropriate harbour, so the entire process is effectively just delaying the inevitable. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. If you think about it, every organism has to die at some point, so every time it wards off death by eating, or breathing, or fighting off a competitor, it is merely delaying the inevitable. However, if the first tiny microbe which came into existence had just given up, because really, what's the point, we wouldn't even exist. Similarly, evolution is entirely propelled by delaying the inevitable. If animals didn't struggle do survive, despite the knowledge they were going to die anyway, the fitter among them wouldn't be able to supersede the weaker, and life would never have been able to progress beyond single-celled blips. However, the main reason why delaying the inevitable is never pointless, is because our tiny human minds are completely incapable of deciding when something is without hope or not. We know nothing, and every last extra second of existence we can scrape gives us a slightly better chance for something completely incomprehensible and brilliant to happen. If you take one thing away from this post (and I would be ecstatic if anyone did), it is this:

Rule One: Always delay the inevitable.

Dang straight I'm doing rules. I like to think that there are things that I can contribute towards ethics, and this is it. Does it make me sound conceited, self important and a bit of a twit? Probably. Am I conceited, self-important and a bit of a twit? Definitely. Ignore all this stuff if you want, but if there's anyone who wants to listen, I'll be here talking. Well, typing. Or, tapping at a screen. Mind you, those phone keypads are tiny. I'll stick with my laptop.

Anyway, I'm fairly sure we're nigh on the end of this post, mainly because I feel like I'm beginning to outstay my welcome in your cerebral cortex, assuming you didn't kick me out somewhere around the first intermission. In conclusion, I think the idea for a bacterialarcspewingexplodingseedpod model of life is a plausible one, and it doesn't even have to have started on Earth. I'm trying not to come across as a conspiracy theorist here, and say aliens put us all here, but it's not entirely impossible that all life on this planet originated from a stray bacterium like organism sent here in a bottle from a planet light years away. We could be at the second, third, or five hundred and ninety second stage of the seed pod model for all we know. Maybe that's an explanation for life coming into being on this planet that I could live with. I'm aware it doesn't really seem to help at all, it's merely delaying the inevitable point where I'm going to have to consider how the first microbe came into being, in some primordial soup on a rock floating through space millions of light years away, but, you know, Rule One.

Full circle!