Nobody Knows How Life Started

Here's a question that sounds simple but has stumped the smartest people on the planet for over 70 years: how did life start?

Not how did life EVOLVE — that's a different question. How did the very first living cell arise from non-living chemistry? How did dead molecules become alive?

Nobody knows.

In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey ran a famous experiment. They simulated what they thought was Earth's early atmosphere, zapped it with electricity, and produced some amino acids — the building blocks of proteins.

Headlines went crazy. "Life created in a lab!" Textbooks still feature this experiment.

But here's what they don't tell you:

• They got amino acids, not LIFE. That's like saying you made a house because you found some bricks in a field.
• The atmosphere they used was almost certainly wrong — the early Earth likely had a different gas composition that doesn't produce amino acids as easily.
• Even the amino acids they got were a mix of types that life doesn't use (life only uses left-handed amino acids; Miller got both).

70+ years later, nobody has come remotely close to creating a living cell from scratch.

The simplest living cell is incomprehensibly complex. Even the most basic bacteria need:

• DNA or RNA to store genetic information
• Proteins to read and execute that information