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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…
