How Did Life Begin?

Trees, grasses, birds, and bees abound on the planet. It's also infested with zillions of bacteria. Everything is life, and everything reproduces to keep its kind alive. But how did life even begin in the first place? How did a swarm of cells transform from an inert collection of organic molecules to a writhing, sometimes intelligent being?

The short answer is that people don't know how life began. There's a chance that aliens dropped off a few microbes 4 billion years ago and let them loose. Of course, many religions have supernatural explanations for the origins of life.

Many scientists believe that life evolved naturally on planets with the necessary ingredients for biology, such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other fundamental building blocks. With the right spark, such as a bolt of lightning, those cornerstones gradually develop into the cell walls and DNA necessary for reproducible life. In laboratories, researchers are constantly conducting experiments like this in the hopes of narrowing in on the formula for creating life.

It's a mystery how those bits of non-living parts assembled themselves into actual living creatures, no matter how hard they tried. It is possible that people are still unaware of the characteristics that truly define life. Or perhaps people are blind to the physical principles that really make life tick. In any case, the search for the origins of life will undoubtedly continue for a long time.