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An environmental catastrophe

Sometimes, a new species will come into being, and explode across the planet. The population increases drastically within a short time period as they learn to use new materials and new forms of energy. Sometimes, they produce material that is poisonous to forms of life that previously hadn’t encountered such substances. Many species can be pushed to the edge of extinction and beyond. This happened approximately 2.5 billion years ago, with the rise of cyanobacteria. The toxic material that was being produced was oxygen. Though it was catastrophic at the time, the presence of oxygen allowed for a new form of life, which could use the free oxygen as an energy source. This allowed for the arrival of the animals, and eventually, us.

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Don’t let the headlines fool you. Nobody knows how life started

This is probably the least coherent episode to date. Though the precursors of life can apparently be produced by processes taking place anywhere from the deep sea to deep space, how to get from those starting chemicals to a living cell is still unknown. Rather than a lack of theories, there are just too damn many of them, all of them seemingly at least plausible, and little or no way to decide between one or another. Perhaps they all happened. Perhaps none of them. Perhaps the actual process has yet to be described. Perhaps pieces of the puzzle simply took too long, or require temperatures and pressures that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

Here’s a link to a Nova special on this subject that covers it much better than I have. Mind you, they had 45 minutes to do it in, rather than the 9 minutes and change I had.

Origin of Life – How Life Started on Earth