Life might be more common in the universe than we thought

Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yOiZLHDV3U

The origin of life is without doubt one of the big open questions of science. We understand
well how solar systems form and how planet Earth was created. We also understand how life
evolved from the first microbes to bipedal mammals with opposing thumbs, though we’re still
trying to figure out why the main use for those thumbs is hitting the poop emoji on a
smartphone. But somewhere in between the formation of our planet and the first microbes,
inanimate matter assembled to self-replicating living creatures. How did this happen? How
much do we know? And why are some scientists claiming that the emergence of life might be
much more common in the universe than anyone thought? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought life came about by “spontaneous generation” from
Life Might Be More Common in The Universe Than We Thought inanimate matter. His belief was
based on the observation that dead bodies and rotting fruit began to teem with maggots and
flies.

This idea of “spontaneous generation” was widely accepted for more than a thousand years,
though it always sat somewhat uneasily with the Catholic Church. But then, in the 17th century,
the Italian scientist Francesco Redi showed that flies only emerged from rotten fruit if other
flies laid eggs on them. The Catholic Church finally rejected the idea of spontaneous
generation, and scientists began to have doubts.

Spontaneous generation was laid to rest in 1859 by the French chemist and microbiologist Louis
Pasteur. He took broth that was full of nutrients and that would normally easily spoil. He put
the broth into a flask whose neck had an “S” shape – a downward bend followed by an upward
bend. It’s often called a swan neck flask. This flask allowed air to enter but kept out dust and
microorganisms. He boiled the broth and found that it didn’t spoil for months. No spontaneous
generation of life! Based on this insight, Pasteur later invented a method to make food more
durable. It’s now called “pasteurization” and is still used today, for example to preserve dairy
products. But throwing out the idea of spontaneous generation of life created a chicken and
egg problem. If you needed life to create life, then where did the first life come from? When
our planet was formed it was a big ball of hot molten rock, and that did one hell of a
pasteurization. Nothing was alive then. You may say that when our planet formed it wasn’t as
well isolated as Pasteur’s flask. Meteorites and comets could, and did, reach it. A seed of life
could have been planted on Earth in this way. This idea is known as “panspermia”. But it
doesn’t solve the riddle, because if life came to us on a meteorite, it still must have originated
somewhere, somehow. Nothing was alive during the Big Bang – atoms didn’t even exist back
then. Since Pasteur the world of science has been enriched with the discovery of the genetic
code and electronic microscopes which make molecular structures visible. And scientists have
returned to spontaneous generation. The trouble begins with the question what we even mean
by “life”. There’s no commonly accepted.
What do we know?

We’ll stick with the definition that NASA uses, according to which life is a self-sustaining
chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. If it’s good enough for NASA, it’s good enough
for us. So if you want to explain the origin of life, you have to explain how a system arises on
which Darwinian evolution can do its work. And we do know a few things about the
circumstances under which it must have happened. Planet Earth is about 4.54 billion years old.
When it formed, it had no solid crust, and the surface temperature was several hundreds
degree Celsius. Over the next half billion years or so, lots of other chunks of matter impacted
earth. A particularly large one is believed to have formed the moon. By around 4 billion years
ago, the surface had cooled enough for a crust to develop.

Earth at this time was not exactly what you’d call a hospitable environment and I’m not talking
about microagressions. At that time, Earth still had a surface temperature above 100 degrees
Celsius and loads of volcanic activity that frequently broke up the thin crust. The atmosphere
was very different from what it is today, with high levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, water
vapor, and toxic gases that were released during volcanic activity. Most scientists believe that
life emerged after the surface temperature had dropped below the temperature where water
boils, 100 degrees Celsius.

The oldest confirmed traces of life are biostructures called stromatolites, that’s layers
of rock which contain remains of single-celled organisms. The organisms are believed to have
been either algae or some kind of bacteria. Scientists have dated them back to about 3.5
billion years. There are fossils that some researchers believe to be older, 3.77 or possibly even
4.28 billion years.

But these have remained highly controversial. The issue is that old rocks don’t preserve
records well, so you don’t really know what you’re looking at. Taking all this together puts the
time window for the origin of life roughly between 3.9 and 3.7 billion years in the past. Though
some scientists say life could have withstood the heavy meteorite bombardment and formed
earlier. And that pretty much sums up what we know. It admittedly isn’t much. How
could you possibly go about finding out what happened so long ago?

There are four major approaches that scientists have tried to make headway on the origin of
life. (1) There are bottom-up approaches that aim at synthesizing the building blocks of life
from molecules that were present on young Earth, often with laboratory experiments. (2) There
are top-down approaches which starting from known organisms, deconstruct them into their
parts, and try to figure out which way they might have come together. (3) There are approaches
that start in the middle with a particular ingredient of life and try to figure out how it could
have been created and then evolved further. This leads to approaches starting for example,
with just RNA, or just protein, or just lipids and so on. The most popular one is currently RNA.
And (4), there are approaches which start not with specific molecules but with sustainable
chemical reactions that allow for metabolic cycles that generate energy. We’ll look at those one
by one. The key question for bottom-up approaches is how do you get organic molecules out of
inorganic stuff? Organic molecules aren’t molecules you get in a farmers’ market.
They’re the ones that contains carbon-hydrogen or carbon-carbon bonds. There are different
ways that scientists think it could have happened. The first idea was that lightning strikes did it,
going back to a now famous experiment by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1952 In their
experiment, Miller and Urey created a closed system from two glass flasks and filled it with
gasses that mimicked the early Earth's atmosphere: water vapor, methane, ammonia, and
hydrogen. They then subjected this mixture to electric sparks to simulate lightning, which is
believed to have been common on early Earth. After a week of this process, they analysed the
contents of the system and found that it contained several amino acids, the building blocks of
proteins.

In 1962, the biochemist Joan Oro did a follow-up experiment and showed that similar
conditions could also produce adenine, one of the four bases of DNA. Other scientists were
later able to demonstrate other chemical reactions that could give rise the precursors of uracil
and cytosine, two other bases of DNA. This all sounds very nice, but these experiments have a
problem. It’s that they all assumed the atmosphere on young Earth contained little to no
oxygen. It was strongly “reducing” as chemist say. That the atmosphere was “reducing” means
that the gases in it like to donate electrons to other atoms. Oxygen, in contrast, tends to take
electrons. These two situations are chemically very different.

Trouble is, in 2011 a group of American researchers published a paper in Nature, which shed
doubt on the idea that atmosphere back then was that low in oxygen. They did this by looking
at the zircon crystals, that are the oldest materials we have, predating even rock. I mean actual
rock, not the music genre, though that’s also a little dated I guess. They tried to recreate those
crystals in the laboratory at different levels of oxygen, but it only worked out correctly in the
presence of oxygen. They speculate that the gas was released by volcanic activity. Then,
however, in 2020 another group argued that there could have been a reducing atmosphere
after all, but it was temporary. They say that the big impact that supposedly formed the moon
left a lot of iron laid bare on the surface of earth, and that iron rapidly combined with all the
oxygen. So it could be that during a period of time after that hypothesized monster impact
there were reducing conditions on our planet, long enough to give rise to life.
Other scientists think that some of the earliest habitable environments may have been
hydrothermal vents or underground pools. This is because in those places you have both
metals and carbon dioxide dissolved in hot water, which then mixes with colder seawater. This
creates conditions that allow the first organic molecules to form. The difference between the
both cases is that the hydrothermal vents always contain water, whereas the ponds have wet-
dry cycles.

The problem of bottom-up approaches is the large number of possibilities. Could have been a
submarine vent, or a drying lagoon, or lightning, or whatever other scenario one can imagine.
And if you think life was created on another planet and then brought here by a meteorite,
all bets are off. It’s basically the many worlds interpretation of organic chemistry.
Let’s then talk about the top-down approaches. For those, one uses genome
sequencing to trace species back in time. The biochemistry of today’s living creatures is
extremely similar. This strongly suggests that we all descended from a last universal common
ancestor, LUCA, for short. Detailed analyses of protein sequences suggest that the LUCA had a
complexity comparable to that of a simple modern bacterium and lived 3.2 to 3.8 billion years
ago.

In the past years, the number of sequenced genomes has increased exponentially,
and with that the intersection of genomes between all species has shrunk to a mere
handful of ribosomal genes. This basically allowed scientists to refine the recipe for
life and allowed them to trace its origin further back in time. A 2018 paper estimates
the time it would have taken environmental factors to create the required number of
mutations and finds that these genes date back more than 3.9 billion years.
The problem with this approach is that the gap between the first ancestor that
we can infer from the surviving record and the earliest life might be too
large. The way of self-replication could have changed multiple times, leaving no trace for us to
follow to figure out what happened just going by what’s left today.

RNA First
This brings us to the third approach, big molecules that can carry forward information
and therefore lend themselves for natural selection to act on.
The best candidate we know for this is currently RNA. RNA is not a double strand like DNA,
but a single strand. In today’s organisms, the main function of the RNA is to read the
DNA to create proteins. RNA executes the will of the DNA, so to speak.
RNA, like DNA, is a sequence of four molecules called nucleotides, but they’re slightly
different. In DNA, the nucleotides contain the four familiar nucleobases ACGT. In RNA you have
U instead of a T and it uses a different type of sugar. It’s been a long time since my high
school biology classes, so let’s do this again the other way round. Nucleobases are part of the
nucleotides, and nucleotides form both the DNA and RNA, though they each have different
nucleobases.

However, RNA is by itself also able to encode information and it can self-replicate. Better
still, once you have the RNA, fatty acid membranes form around it spontaneously.
This gives rise to a rudimentary protocell. It’s even able to divide when more fatty acids
get incorporated into the membrane and the RNA could replicate inside.
Sounds good, but where does the RNA come from to begin with? RNA is a very long molecule.
At present, scientists believe that it emerged from shorter strands, small RNA pieces that
are called template molecules, and which then guide the formation of the long RNA.
Ok, but then where do the template molecules come from? Scientists think the wet-dry cycles
of warm ponds create large chemical gradients that make it possible for such long molecule
chains to form from nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA. Ok, but where did the nucleotides
come from? They come from the nucleobases plus other organic stuff. This too favours the
hydrothermal vents. In 2017 paper a group of researchers from Canada and Germany built a
numerical model for how nucleotides form from nucleobases in hydrothermal vents and found
it takes only a few years. They said that this could have happened as early as 4.17 billion years
ago.

And where did the nucleobases come from? They come from outer space! At least that’s what
they assume in the paper. It’s plausible because these molecules have indeed been
found on meteorites. They say the space dust wouldn’t work because the density is too low.
So, the idea is this. You get the nucleobases from outer space. They fall into a warm pond.
There they undergo chemical reactions which create the nucleotides. The nucleotides
combine to RNA template molecules. And the template molecules polymerize RNA. Then
add a few billion years of evolution and you get YouTube. Simple enough!
And how did the nucleobases get onto the meteorite? Ah, yeah, good question.

Metabolism First

Since the gap in complexity between molecules that easily pop into existence and the self-
replicating molecules capable of carrying information is so large some scientists have proposed
that maybe what came first was a type of metabolism, the ability of systems to extract energy
from their environment to maintain themselves. This idea was popularized by the American
researcher Stuart Kauffman in his book “At Home in the Universe”. He suggested what he
called “autocatalytic sets”, that are networks of chemicals that are both products and catalysts.
This means they can keep on churning out new products while producing energy along the
way. According to Kauffman, these autocatalytic sets are the missing link between inanimate
and animate matter. Indeed, in a 2020 paper a team including Kauffman looked into how these
networks of reactions could have arisen from scratch. They looked at some single-celled
organisms that still exist today and found that their metabolic sets overlap to form an ancient
core network of 172 reactions. It is self-sustaining can generate both amino acids and nucleic
acid bases. In a follow-up paper from 2022 two of the same authors found an even larger set of
more than 2700 elements. They spanned a surprising variety of sizes: from as few as 3 to as
many as 619 reactions. Most of them are smaller than those of creatures living today, which is
interesting because it points to an intermediate state in the evolution of metabolism.

The authors conclude that the ease at which these autocatalytic networks can emerge from
basic chemical reactions indicates that molecular reproduction may be much more prevalent in
the universe than predicted. If that is correct, life might not be rare in the universe, but the
very opposite, it might be pretty much unavoidable. Because once you have sufficiently many
molecules that can react with each other, the probability that you get a self-catalysing cycle
approaches 100 percent. And this really was the reason I made this entire video. Because it’s so
stunning I don’t understand why this wasn’t front page news in all newspapers on the globe.
Hey, the universe might be brimming with life. Yes, there’s still the problem of just exactly how
those molecules assembled. You didn’t actually expect me to say the case has been settled did
you?

Summary
In summary, the prevailing scientific hypothesis for the origin of life is that it was not a single
event, but a sequence of steps of increasing complexity. It required first the formation of
organic molecules, then cyclic reactions of molecules that create energy and more of
themselves, the formation of increasingly larger molecules that carry forward information in
their sequence, the self-replication of this sequence, and the emergence of cell membranes.
The details on how it happened are unclear. And since the evidence may have been lost forever,
we may never know for sure. Or maybe one day we will understand that life is an inevitable
consequence of a universe that evolves towards increasing complexity, maybe just so that
someone is there to admire its beauty. If you dig into the literature on the origin of life, you’ll
quickly find.