• Question: How did life begin?

    Asked by Megan to Emma, Monica, Sebastian, Sinead, Thomas on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Emma Roycroft

      Emma Roycroft answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      They say it was the ‘big bang’. You’ll have to google the rest…

    • Photo: Thomas McLoughlin

      Thomas McLoughlin answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      agree with Emma

    • Photo: Sinead Loughran

      Sinead Loughran answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      This is a really interesting question.

      One of the scientists I most admire is the famous astronomer Carl Sagan (now deceased). In order to help people understand just how far apart on a time scale events in the Universe are, he popularised the “Cosmic Calendar”.

      If you have time you should watch ‘Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey’ – it is an amazing programme. Check it out on the link below,

      If the history of the universe is compressed into one calendar year, with the ‘big bang’ happening on Jan 1st, every month in the cosmic calendar represents about a billion years, the milky way disk appears in May, our solar system appears in September and life follows that.

    • Photo: Sebastian Gornik

      Sebastian Gornik answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Wow! Amazing question, but impossible to answer to its fullest in this format :-).

      It is currently hypothesised that life on earth started in a primordial soup of chemicals and first was all based on RNA molecules – the so-called RNA world. Life as we know it soon followed.

      To learn more about the RNA world check this wikipedia link and enjoy:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world

Comments