• Question: What's your theory of life being made?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I am definitely a fan of the Big Bang theory. I do however get quite dizzy when I think about it because it is pretty crazy just how big the universe is and the possibility that it is still expanding makes it even crazier! Here is a great wee video to help explain about the Big Bang:

    • Photo: Anna Bramwell-Dicks

      Anna Bramwell-Dicks answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      It’s got to be the Big Bang Theory. Fiona’s video link is great, you should watch that!

    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Do you mean biological life? I read a long time ago about something to do with a chemical accident producing a some kind of DNA… problem is that life is so complex that it’s hard to imagine how it could “start”. Our bodies are such complicated machines that are able to reproduce, as are viruses and bacteria. Certainly it’s much more likely that something simpler like a virus (that basically is a DNA replicating machine and not much else) came into existence before more complicated structures like plants.

    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      That is an interesting question because it makes an assumption that life is being made and that implies a maker. We don’t know if there is a maker or not but we do know that life exists. Life, somehow, happened. The most popular theory and the one that I follow is that random variations resulted in patterns that duplicate themselves. It might seem unlikely that it would work that way as random variations would produce many millions of different patterns but one that could make copies of itself would go from one in many millions to two then four then eight and so on until there were millions of copies. Random variations would not stop and so we would get lots of slightly different versions of the first pattern that could copy itself. Over time, that would give us millions of species and billions of individuals. That is what we find that we have so it seems like a good theory

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      The theory that makes the most sense to me is the idea of life evolving out of some huge primordial soup-like mass of molecules. Under certain conditions these simple molecules are likely to form more complex molecules that can replicate and form more complex structures and replicate and so on. Of course each individual event in this story is very unlikely, but if there are so many molecules and so much time then even a series of very unlikely events will eventually happen.

      Over the years scientists have tried to replicate what they think are early conditions on earth and claim to have seen the formation of amino acids. The Miller-Urey experiments are the most famous of these. There is some controversy surrounding these experiments, so you might want to look them up and make up your own mind.

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