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---------------------- 2361 - How Did God Start Life on Earth?
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- When the Earth and the Solar System first formed 4,600,000,000 years ago life soon followed. We have deduced that years ago life comes from life. But, how did life come from chemistry? Somehow Earth’s environment in the first billion years turned chemistry into biology.
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- All the elements on Earth originally came from star dust. Interstellar dust collected and gravity pulled it to a center with a spinning accretion disk circling the center core. All the chemical elements except for hydrogen, helium, and lithium came from fusion and the explosion of earlier supernovae stars.
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- The larger stars formed first, burned their hydrogen and helium quickly, and exploded into supernovae spreading their expanding gas and dust in amongst the stars. The 116 chemical elements we find in our chemistry books were in this dust after repeated star formations.
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- The dust ring circling the Sun became the planets, asteroids, and comets that orbit the Sun today. On our planet it started with this non-living matter. How did non-living matter become living matter?
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- Science has struggled with this question since the beginning of science. Back in 1953 an experiment in a glass-bulb started the search in earnest. Water, hydrogen, ammonia, and methane in the glass bulb were selected to match the atmosphere of early Earth. Heat to simulate the Sun and electric sparks to simulate the lightning resulted in a brownish-red residue inside the bulb. In the residue were found amino acids known to be essential in life’s chemistry.
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- Since that time science has found these same amino acids in meteorites, comets, even the interstellar dust itself. The stuff that life is made of is abundant.
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- Science has focused on life evolving from some form of primordial soup containing these elements. The theory was that somewhere a tide pool of these molecules were just right to begin reproducing themselves as single living cells.
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- In 1984 science again got very excited when a Mars meteorite was found and thought to contain a microscopic fossil of life forms. After much fanfare the later conclusions were that the structures were formed by mineral deposits, not fossils. But, maybe the mineral deposit structures helped to support early life? The excitement restarted the search for life in new places.
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- Science was pursuing two avenues of research. First, life was “ accidental”. That molecules swirled around at random. They came together in the first primitive cell in a single unrepeated event. From this beginning living cells multiplied.
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- The second avenue is that life evolves from some predefined “theory”. There are physical laws that drive some reaction pathway in preference to others that produce a predictable outcome. Life is a predictable outcome of these natural laws. Laws we have yet to discover.
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- The natural laws got close when it was discovered that ribonucleic acid, RNA, used in life to translate the genetic code of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, could turn into enzymes that in turn make proteins. The question was could RNA molecules make the enzymes according to ordinary laws of chemistry, yet missing the codes of DNA?
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- At first science thought life’s start needed a particular environment, a tidal pool, a deep sea volcanic vent, and surely at minimum liquid water. However, another theory came along that said, not necessarily.
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- Metabolism uses 11 basic molecules in our body to breakdown the large molecules in food in order to generate energy. This is how we digest our food. Maybe, in the first primitive cells this process worked in reverse. Somehow energy was used to assemble larger molecules. Whatever the mechanism most science believes life had a simple beginning and evolved its complexity through “natural selection“.
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- If you push these theories far enough you get a Universe that not only allows life but requires it. Our world relies on the chemistry of elements. Elements are atoms in their ground state that are in their lowest energy levels. Energy always seeks its lowest level. Energy can not be created or destroyed it can only be transformed. The idea here is that life does transform energy keeping it at ground level.
- This is not just electrons at their lowest energy levels for the elements. The fundamental particles at ground level are Up-Quarks, Down-Quarks, electrons and photons.
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- Nature has higher energy levels that exist for some reason we do not understand. Adding energy to fundamental particles creates Strange-Quarks, Charm Quarks and Muons that quickly decay to the ground state particles. Adding more energy creates Top-Quarks, Bottom-Quarks, and Taus that also quickly decay to the lower energy states.
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- If geological processes somehow push particles into higher energy states they would naturally seek to return to their ground state. Maybe life is here to help nature solve nature’s energy problems. Living systems use chemical reactions to get down to lower energies. That is how living things work. If this is a natural law then life could evolve anywhere in the Cosmos. Anywhere normal geological process can be found.
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- We don’t know. The mystery remains how it all started. Let alone, how did it get so complex as nature is today. How did conscientiousness appear in the brain? Am I really here thinking about these things? What a miracle that I can even write this, let alone think this. How did it all happen? God only knows.
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- May 12, 2019 1151
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-------------------------- Sunday, May 12, 2019 --------------------------
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