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Why Hasn’t Life Appeared on Earth Multiple Times?
Or, why abiogenesis can only happen once per planet
I hear this question quite often, especially from theists. People seem to think abiogenesis is purely a matter of luck and statistics. If it happened once, billions of years ago, then why hasn’t it happened in all that time since then?
This is a very cringe-worthy video of people not understanding the topic. It’s hard to refute this kind of thing because it’s just so fundamentally ignorant of the basics.
Life can’t suddenly appear in a jar of peanut butter. That’s not how it works; it’s not magic. It’s a process that requires a planet-wide ocean, full to the brim with self-organizing structures, amino acids, and autocatalytic chemicals, roiling and boiling, frothing and brothing, splishing, splashing and sloshing, for millions of years.
Before life existed, the oceans were a rich soup teeming with chemicals. There was nothing mopping them up. They remained free in the environment, interacting with each other, diffusing, spreading, mixing, dissolving, recrystallizing, evaporating, condensing, precipitating, etc. Once life had begun, however, it replicated and spread, sucking up all those free chemicals. Life drained the soup of flavor, leaving just the salty brine. All those chemicals are now locked up inside extant organisms, all part of the food chain.
There are still pockets of chemical and energy-rich environments, such as hydrothermal vents in the bottom of the ocean, that spew free chemicals out in boiling plumes, but they are surrounded by all kinds of complex life forms, consuming whatever free nutrients they can get their slimy tendrils on. They have had billions of years to evolve to become experts at extracting nutrients and are very good at it.
Life has no chance to form again because there is no free substrate for it to form on. The circumstances needed for it are no longer available, and will never be, as long as there is a single organism capable of…
