How Did Life on Earth Begin

Life as defined by Knoll, a profesor of Biology at Harvard, is a system in which proteins and nucleic acid interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce (2004). Or in other words, one can describe life as having these six features; i) have carbon as a driving force, essential for it to grow and being able to make copies for itself and also must have the ability to convert the inorganic sources like carbon dioxide into organic molecules, in the case of hetrotrophics. ii) metabolism, a catalysis-based reactions that occur in a body or system. iii) replication, as a starting point of heredity. A life must be able to pass its structural or functional codes to the next generation. iv) cell compartmentalisation, which makes a life distinguishable from the environment. v) energy as power source. Back to early life, this comes from the disequilibria from the environment, that drive things to move forward. vi) excretion, waste disposal must be continuous to prevent it from being accumulated and ensuring forward momentum.

The earliest paleantology evidence of life on earth dated back 3.2 million years ago, where they discovered microbes in the rock formation of the Transvaal (Grasse P.P., 1977). These organisms may have employed amino acids, or maybe proteins contained in the sea sediments. More than that, photosynthetic organisms, primarily known as cyanobacteria, a green-blue algae was also found fossilised in stromatolite more recent (2.3 billon years old) near the shores of Lake Superior in Canada. The presence of specially-structured cells, with nucleus and chromosomes (which contain DNA) in this algae, definitely display similarities with all life today. Thus, to suggest the first forms of life, one has to imag...

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