Wednesday 7 April 2010

The Origin of Life?

"Where do we come from and why are we here?"

It is quite possibly the single most important question we can ask ourselves and surely one we have all thought about multiple times. Yet it remains a question to which the answer is aggravatingly elusive, with different people having resorted to different beliefs in order to come to terms with it. This belief ranges anywhere from resolute religous zealots to die-hard scientists convinced that evolution is the key. As somebody with a passion for Genetics one might assume I am siding with the latter, yet you would be mistaken!

Ironically, delving into the fascinating and beautiful workings of life at a microscopic level has made it increasingly harder for me to accept, that in all its brilliance life is the result of no more than mere evolutionary serendipity. Although I am not trying to question the presence of evolution and natural selection, I am doubtful about the extent to which it can account for the entire legacy of life on our planet.

Yet If biochemical evolution did occur on Earth during the past 4.5 billion years, why only here? Life on Earth is thought to have arisen after about a billion years ago yet the universe is estimated to be over 13 billion years old and over 90 billion lightyears accross. Undoubtedly the universe is vast enough for evolution to have occured in other solar systems far older than our own. Even celestial bodies close to home like Titan (one of Saturn's moons) are thought to have many of the properties needed for life, so what would make us so unique? Could we have arisen from molecules that somehow collected on our beloved planet? Would we be able to tell if extraterrestrial life landed on our planet many billions of years ago and gave evolution a helping hand?


There are many questions which still need to be addressed before we can make bold claims about our existence. Yet when looking at how far we have come in even the last 100 years, perhaps even questions as overwhelming as these can be answered. For now however, I struggle to answer this question with any conviction. Yet whether through random alignment of the cosmos, a greater being or even some other reason, we have been given a remarkable gift that we should cherish and enjoy!

1 comment:

  1. Nice post!!! ;)
    I think there's plenty of life in the 'universe! there are billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars, each star will have a minimum of from 3 to 9 planets!!! so there a lot of life!!!

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