Life abounds on the earth today, but we all know that there was a time before it existed on this planet. You can therefore divide earth's lifetime into two parts, before and after life emerged. Imagine that you are zooming in on the timeline now. There must have been a day before life emerged and a day after. An hour before and an hour after. A second before and a second after. Whatever building blocks were developing over a great expanse of time in order to make life possible, the actual emergence of life was something that happened in an instant. If you imagine a film of life emerging, with billions of frames per second, you can imagine looking at new life, agreeing that it is alive, and then looking back, frame by frame, until you agree that it is not. On one of those frames, then, perhaps arbitrarily small, is an event of such magnificent importance that it is the essence of life itself. It is the spark that made organic compounds living compounds. It is not chemical. It is not electrical. It is something altogether different.
Think about it a little deeper. When life emerged on this planet, was it as a single event, highly improbable, that required all life after it to derive from it? Or did life emerge spontaneously and independently in many places on earth? And if it did, why do we not see any evidence of the spontaneous emergence of life on earth today? Is it possible that our planet, so hospitable to life's evolution and survival, is no longer hospitable to its emergence?
Every living thing on earth today is a derivative of something that came before it. We cannot manufacture life out of base components. We have to use the biological tools we've been given—in humanity's case, sperm and eggs—in order to reproduce life, to produce life again. We cannot mix a vat of organic compounds together and run a current through it and expect life to emerge. We are missing that quintessence, that spark. I'd like to know what it is.
To simply declare it a mystery is not satisfying to me. For this stuff of life is ubiquitous on this planet, making up the seen and unseen to the degree that it threatens itself by its own overabundance. We have tried to define life through its characteristics: organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction. But these are mere symptoms of life and not life itself.
Whatever it is, it seems to transcend matter, which is really mostly empty space, given the illusion of continuity by our useful, but inaccurate senses. On the smallest scale, well inside the atoms and quarks, the components of the living and the nonliving are the same. What, then, infused into those structures or the spaces between, makes all the difference?
For any one thing given the gift of life, the process eventually ends. A thing that is living eventually becomes a thing that was living, and the organized structure that once housed the mystery becomes but an artifact, seemingly incapable of holding the spark again. It should then perhaps be our goal to study the subtlety of death to better understand life. After all, perhaps the criterion that best determines whether something is alive is its ability to die.
Think about it a little deeper. When life emerged on this planet, was it as a single event, highly improbable, that required all life after it to derive from it? Or did life emerge spontaneously and independently in many places on earth? And if it did, why do we not see any evidence of the spontaneous emergence of life on earth today? Is it possible that our planet, so hospitable to life's evolution and survival, is no longer hospitable to its emergence?
Every living thing on earth today is a derivative of something that came before it. We cannot manufacture life out of base components. We have to use the biological tools we've been given—in humanity's case, sperm and eggs—in order to reproduce life, to produce life again. We cannot mix a vat of organic compounds together and run a current through it and expect life to emerge. We are missing that quintessence, that spark. I'd like to know what it is.
To simply declare it a mystery is not satisfying to me. For this stuff of life is ubiquitous on this planet, making up the seen and unseen to the degree that it threatens itself by its own overabundance. We have tried to define life through its characteristics: organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction. But these are mere symptoms of life and not life itself.
Whatever it is, it seems to transcend matter, which is really mostly empty space, given the illusion of continuity by our useful, but inaccurate senses. On the smallest scale, well inside the atoms and quarks, the components of the living and the nonliving are the same. What, then, infused into those structures or the spaces between, makes all the difference?
For any one thing given the gift of life, the process eventually ends. A thing that is living eventually becomes a thing that was living, and the organized structure that once housed the mystery becomes but an artifact, seemingly incapable of holding the spark again. It should then perhaps be our goal to study the subtlety of death to better understand life. After all, perhaps the criterion that best determines whether something is alive is its ability to die.
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