Question: How did life begin?

Thomas Barrett answered on 17 Mar 2015:

Good question Muhammad!

Well science doesn’t really know exactly how life formed. But we know the types of ingredients and the conditions that we need we can begin to work out what happened.

We learnt all of this through the study of simple organisms and the chemistry of living things. The main theory is that living things developed from molecules that could replicate, or copy, themselves, rather like DNA does.

There are two possible origins for these replicating molecules:

they were produced by the conditions on Earth at the time
they came from somewhere else, such as another planet in our Solar System, or further out in space

What caused that initial ‘spark’ from inanimate to living is still a mystery and may always be.