The Origin of Life

This week Nathan and Sean discuss the origin of life on Earth! Every cell in your body came, ultimately, from the zygote that was made when your dad’s sperm wiggled its way into your mom’s egg. And those little dudes came from another cell, and another, leading all the way back in time - a physical chain of cell divisions leading back to that very first cell. But what existed in the moments before that? Where did that cell come from?

Error Thingy: Nathan asked Sean for a timeline on the origin of life, and Sean low-balled it at 3 billion years ago, which is a little short of the current scientific estimates, which place the first cellular life as emerging as recently at 3.5 billion years ago and as far back as 4.2 billion years ago. Given that the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, that could mean that life got going pretty quickly. We’ll see how those estimates hold up as our scientific knowledge expands!

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Some References:

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/43/11327.full

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/5/1/294/htm

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982215006818