Extra: Did Life Start Twice On Earth?

The thing that I think about at night when I wake up at three o'clock in the morning, because I can't sleep for one reason or another, is that our best theory right now, and we're pretty certain about this, is that we came from rock.

And I find that such a crazy idea.

So there was a period where we were rock, and then there was a period where we were living things that we all know and sometimes love and sometimes hate.

The fascinating thing is that transition, is how something that was inert became something that was living.

And that's what we wanted to talk to you a little bit about.

So how do we figure out the question of how that happened?

Jonathan, you wake up at night with very difficult questions.

I suggest you go for simpler questions in the middle of the night.

It makes it easier to go back to sleep.

Everything does point at the moment to the notion or the idea or the theory that life arose from rocks, not just rocks themselves, but from rocks and water, rock-water interactions.

Of course, there had to be carbon involved.

And there had to be nutrients involved.

And I guess most of us would say life arose once because we look at the attributes that are common to all cells.

For example, the genetic code.

The genetic code arose once.

That's a...

the information processing program that converts information in genes into information in proteins.

That's the same in all cells.

It's the best evidence we have for a single origin.

But there are, at the most basic level, if we take... complicated cells like our own eukaryotes that arose very late in evolution.

We go down to the cells, the kinds of cells that existed on the early Earth maybe four billion years ago.

There are two kinds, very distinct kinds.

And these have been known since the 1970s.

There are bacteria, the standard sorts of things that gives us infections and that that colonize our gastrointestinal system and help us live.

And then there are other cells called archaea, which were discovered by Carl Rose and colleagues in the 1970s and George Fox.

The thing that I think about at night when I wake up at three o'clock in the morning, because I can't sleep for one reason or another, is that our best theory right now, and we're pretty certain about this, is that we came from rock.

And I find that such a crazy idea.

So there was a period where we were rock, and then there was a period where we were living things that we all know and sometimes love and sometimes hate.

The fascinating thing is that transition, is how something that was inert became something that was living.

And that's what we wanted to talk to you a little bit about.

So how do we figure out the question of how that happened?

Jonathan, you wake up at night with very difficult questions.

I suggest you go for simpler questions in the middle of the night.

It makes it easier to go back to sleep.

Everything does point at the moment to the notion or the idea or the theory that life arose from rocks, not just rocks themselves, but from rocks and water, rock-water interactions.

Of course, there had to be carbon involved.

And there had to be nutrients involved.

And I guess most of us would say life arose once because we look at the attributes that are common to all cells.

For example, the genetic code.

The genetic code arose once.

That's a...

the information processing program that converts information in genes into information in proteins.

That's the same in all cells.

It's the best evidence we have for a single origin.

But there are, at the most basic level, if we take... complicated cells like our own eukaryotes that arose very late in evolution.

We go down to the cells, the kinds of cells that existed on the early Earth maybe four billion years ago.

There are two kinds, very distinct kinds.

And these have been known since the 1970s.

There are bacteria, the standard sorts of things that gives us infections and that that colonize our gastrointestinal system and help us live.

And then there are other cells called archaea, which were discovered by Carl Rose and colleagues in the 1970s and George Fox.