If life began in a "primordial soup" long ago...?

Question

Then where lies the difficulty in duplicating the chemical composition of this soup and initiate life once again in the laboratory like it did millions of years ago?

Answer 1

One ingredient .... TIME.

I.e., it's not just as simple as saying it is "primordial soup". We don't have a perfect knowledge of what was in that soup. We have a pretty good, but not a perfect, idea of the conditions of the early earth. And in that early earth, there were many many different environments in which life could have emerged (deep sea ocean vents, surface of the oceans, shallow pools, tidal shallows, terrestrial geysers, combinations of the above, etc.).

But the one thing that's REALLY hard to duplicate in a laboratory is the effect of 1 to 1.2 billion years of TIME. In other words, it's not just the right chemical ingredients, but the mystery of how long those ingredients would have to percolate in one environment followed by a different one followed by another one, etc.

However, that said, we are getting closer all the time. (See source.) This is a very difficult problem, but there is no evidence that this is an impossible problem.

Answer 2

> Then where lies the difficulty in duplicating the chemical composition of this soup
Primordial soup is very much hypothetical. We don't really know what the atmosphere of early Earth was like; we just suppose by viewing the atmospheres of places like Venus and the gas giants. We could be wrong.

> initiate life once again in the laboratory
It took a billion years to happen on Earth, and there was a whole planet full of interesting soup. Our laboratories aren't big enough and no one's going to fund an experiment that won't produce results for a billion years.

Answer 3

These conditions have been duplicated. A famous experiment was conducted (in the '50's I believe, but don't quoute me on that) where the same conditions as a primordial soup were recreated. Upon passing a current of electricity through the soup, scientists managed to synthesise amino acids-the basis of life.

Answer 4

In 1953, the promoters of this "primordial soup" theory thought they had found proof when Stanley L. Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, constructed an apparatus that supposedly re-created those early conditions. He circulated steam through a mixture of ammonia, methane, and hydrogen, and then sent a high-energy electrical spark through the mixture, in imitation of the hypothesized lightning bolt. He continued to do this for the span of one week, after which time his mixture became red and murky. It was found to contain complex amino acids — the essential building blocks of life. Prof. A. Lee McAlester of Yale writes of them:


These studies have led scientists to visualize a time early in Earth history when the surface was covered with oceans or lakes that were rich in non-biologically produced molecules fundamental to life. This theory has been sold to students, academics, and the general public as if it were infallible truth. However, there have been major problems with it. The first is that the presence of a scientist like Miller (who is now at the University of California, San Diego) is necessary to set up the system and add the external energy needed for the appearance of life. In other words, an outside Intelligent Designer, with a specific purpose in mind (i.e., the creation of life on a lifeless planet), is required for the theory to work. Miller’s experiment, then, did not disprove the need for a Creator; rather, it demonstrated that a creator was precisely what was needed to "get things going."Second, this scenario, as postulated by Haldane and Oparin and supposedly "proved" by Miller, cannot be proven by the fossil record. Prof. McAlester notes that we will never find evidence of this imagined "soup."


The first simple organisms that hypothetically formed in this soup (no real organism, even single celled, have ever been created in any experiments ) had to draw sustenance from the soup itself. "In other words," he notes, "they must have ‘eaten’ the organic soup from which they arose," thus causing the soup itself to disappear.

Answer 5

I'm a little rusty on this one, its been a while..but I remember a duplication of what we think the primordial sea consisted of being exposed to an electrical discharge, which resulted in some protein pre-cursors.( bit vague I know, lol) however, unless combined with a top notch time-machine or a really long term research project its not really going to yield any worthwhile results! interesting though, if anyone has a couple of 100 billion spare I'm in!

Answer 6

Life originated about 3.5-3.8 billion years ago. But the earth had already been around for at least a billion years or so. So, we've been doing these kinds of experiments for 50 years. Give us another billion years, and it might happen in a lab sometime...

Answer 7

yeah, one ingridient is time. Now...if we wanted to do that in a lab, it would take millions of years to see the results. Also, if you think about it, we have to be maintaining that thing going on, adding substances, etc.