The recipe for life

When the earth was just a "baby", everything was chaos, oceans of lava, asteroid impacts 24/7 and lots of radiation, it was nothing like the cozy and quiet place it is now.

But we know that somehow in those conditions 4 billion years ago microscopic life already existed, in the form of blue-green algae, in the recently created oceans of liquid water, this has always intrigued us and we have searched for the answer to the question how life began on earth, specifically when the mineral became biological.

To find the origin of life, we must first have a very clear definition of life and no, it is not as simple as it seems, but the current consensus considers life to be a self-sustaining chemical system, capable of Darwinian evolution, that is, it can function by itself. itself with what it has in hand to be able to evolve by means of natural selection through its reproduction, we have a chemical system that can be replicated and its children can present new characteristics, mutations that will benefit them by giving them greater success and those that do not have Well, well, they won't be able to reproduce and that's as far as they go.

One of the hypotheses of the origin of life is that of RNA, ribonucleic acid, which, together with DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, are the basis of all life on this planet, from viruses that some do not consider living beings, it depends on the definition of life to which you adhere, even the largest organisms, the most complex and the most mysterious.

RNA is a long molecule made up of a chain of molecules called ribonucleotides, which in turn are made up of a sugar molecule, called ribose, a phosphate, and one of the four nitrogenous bases, adenine, cytosine, uracil, and guanine; we can think of the sugar molecule with the phosphate as the backbone of the RNA is the part that connects to other sugars with their phosphates to form a chain and the nitrogenous bases are like connections whose tips can attract or repel the tips of other nitrogenous bases as if it were a magnet.

Cytosine attracts guanine and adenine attracts uracil and that's it, as simple as it sounds, this is what makes RNA work like the evolution machine that it is, a long enough chain can self-replicate by collecting loose ribonucleotides in the environment, attracting with each of its nitrogenous bases its complementary bases thus creating a new identical or complementary chain that has the same characteristics and these characteristics can also be very diverse because its nitrogenous bases can also attract other bases of its same chain creating a diversity of forms that the only limit they know is the length of the chain.

Each shape and each fold will allow you to have new capabilities and even interact and transform other compounds in your environment for your benefit, this all the time inside our cells, we are full of tiny machines, so RNA alone could evolve into viruses, single-celled organisms, such as blue-green algae, archaea, and bacteria.

The cell walls would be like a shield developed by natural selection to protect the RNA chain inside and later evolved to become eukaryotic organisms, which are us animals, plants and fungi, but basically we remain the same, an armor, a vehicle that allows our genetic material to keep replicating, but there's a little problem with this. RNA seems to be the origin, but we don't know how that RNA originated.

We suspected that it had been produced in places where chemical reactions could be maintained, continuous as hydrothermal vents in the ocean, some inorganic compounds capable of replication were even suggested, but none with the complexity necessary to evolve, it is an intelligent design that suggests a secret ingredient, which is found on earth or comes from outside it, and suggests that life is very scarce or abundant in the universe. what do you think?

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