A question thats been bothering me?

Question

The earth is billions years old right? And some say when earth was being formed at the beggining there was nothing but molten hot "magma" and no life or air couldive existed. Then the earth cooled down, and then wait a minute, we already have the first primitive life forms? So my question is where did that sudden burst of life come from? Did it appear out of thin air like the big bang?

Answer 1

Outgassing and volcanic activity produced the primordial atmosphere. Condensing water vapor, augmented by ice delivered by comets, produced the oceans.[6] The highly energetic chemistry is believed to have produced a self-replicating molecule around 4 billion years ago, and half a billion years later, the last common ancestor of all life existed.[7]

The development of photosynthesis allowed the sun's energy to be harvested directly by life forms; the resultant oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere and resulted in a layer of ozone (a form of molecular oxygen [O3]) in the upper atmosphere. The incorporation of smaller cells within larger ones resulted in the development of complex cells called eukaryotes.[8] True multicellular organisms formed as cells within colonies became increasingly specialized. Aided by the absorption of harmful ultraviolet radiation by the ozone layer, life colonized the surface of Earth.[9]

As the surface continually reshaped itself, over hundreds of millions of years, continents formed and broke up. The continents migrated across the surface, occasionally combining to form a supercontinent. Roughly 750 million years ago (mya), the earliest known supercontinent Rodinia, began to break apart. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia, 600–540 mya, then finally Pangaea, which broke apart 180 mya

Answer 2

You have huge lengthy answers...sorry I didn't feel like reading them...so sorry if someone has written this exact same response disregard....

The Earth is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old. Dinosaurs are only traced back to 230 million years ago....not billion! Dinosaurs did not appear on the Earth for MILLION AND MILLION OF YEARS after the formation of the planet! It wasn't an immediate thing. Everything that has formed into anything started off as hot matter. As the planets started to cool....and once dinosaurs appeared, the planet was able to hold life. This means that the Earth went through million and million of years growing before any life appeared. The dinosaurs then died out approximately 160 million years later. This is from evolution and from the planet forming, growing, and recycling resources.

No...nothing appeared out of thin air. The big bang theory is not "out of thin air." The point that the matter had to reach in order to start the growing of planets may have been a split seconds, but everything had to form....no spontaneous appearances!

Hope that helped!

Answer 3

The book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible is very interesting, if one really looks at it without preconceived ideas, religious or otherwise. It opens up and flatly states that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But suddenly it begins not at the beginning. God doesn't reveal the very beginning. Instead we are shown an earth covered with an abyss of water and darkness. It is like starting a book and the first several pages are missing. So Genesis starts with an earth covered with water and darkness. The earth is barren and no form of life is on it. So how did it get to that stage? Genesis does not reveal those facts. God did not call the very beginning the first day; He called the creation of light the first day, after the earth was already created. The creation days were not reckoned by our solar sun as the sun was not created until the fourth day. For the first three "days", creation is a long process. God commanded that the earth produce vegetation -- not instantly create the vegetation already mature. On the fourth day the sun was created. Not an accident either. The first three days were a long process that readied the earth for habitation. How long those days were is a matter of speculation. However, on the fourth day the sun is created, and for the first time the earth experiences 24 hour solar days. This marks a separation. The first three days were of great length, as the creation process unfolded. However, after the sun was created, the days were shortened to the solar rate. God instantly created living beings fully mature, to be the primordial parents for the living creatures to be born. And once this process was started by instantaneous creation, the process has continued until this day. We experience 24 hour solar days just like our first parents did. Some religious nuts insist that the days of creation were all 24 hour days. How silly. They give Genesis a bad rap. Check it out yourself.

Answer 4

Well, the oldest rocks on Earth are about 4.5 Billion years old. The first cell like fossil structures are about 3.9 Billion years old, so we've got about 600 million years to work with.
As with other planets in our solar system, hydrocarbons such as methane, and gasses like nitrogen and of course water were present on the early earth, through volcanic outgassing and cometary impacts.

In 1957, Scientists Urey and Miller devised an experiment where they took these early atmospheric constituents and put them in a glass jar. By applying energy through the form of an electrical spark to the mix, the chemicals began to react to form complex organic molecules such as amino acids which are the fundamental building blocks of life. Later experiments using UV radiation such as would have been abundant on a pre-ozone layer earth successfully produced the four chemical components of DNA, and even spherules resembling the early microfossils.

While we have not successfully synthesised DNA or Life in a laboratory, we have only been trying for 50 years. But it does point out that with the same materials and energy sources available it is quite likely to have happened on its own during the course of 600 million years...

Answer 5

Dear Uiop:

Let me get this straight...you want to know where life came from?

Ha...Interesting question. Have you any idea how many thousands of people have asked the same question? Since
you are asking about the very most primitive beginnings of life, how do you suppose any human being living today could possibly answer you with any degree of certainty? They were not alive back then. In fact, at the beginning there were no humans alive at all. So, not one person can answer your question with authority. So many people come into Yahoo and ask these questions I often wonder where their minds are...

All answers you receive will be theories, educated guesses, and wild guesses, not fact. And, if it does not bother you to much, what difference could it possibly make today???

Your question is similar to the one asked by others with little idea of the futility of asking, " What will happen after the end of everything?" Who in the heck knows?

Answer 6

We do not yet know what came before the Big Bang. The initial explosion and expansion of our universe occurred about 12 to 15 billion years ago. This release of an incredible amount of energy cooled and expanded over billions of years, eventually coalescing into the matter that makes up the atoms and molecules of our bodies, our world, our sun, our solar system, our galaxy, and all the galaxies of the universe.

The universe continues to expand, and the latest research shows that this expansion is accelerating. This means that the underlying space is expanding, not that objects such as galaxies, planets, and people are expanding. The space which we occupy is expanding slightly, but gravity and molecular attraction are much stronger on a local scale than the current expansion of the universe, and thus each person, planet, star, galaxy, and even cluster of galaxies remains whole. Far away galaxies, however, are receding from us. We do not yet know if the universe is finite or infinite, or if the expansion will continue to accelerate or not.


The Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the disk of matter spinning around the Sun, which formed about half a billion years earlier from swirling clouds of gas in space in the outer arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The matter forming the earth was a combination of dust, ice, rock, and gas. As the Earth grew larger, the individual pieces of matter were initially crushed by gravity, then melted under the intense heat and pressure inside what grew to a planet-sized body. Heavier elements such as iron sank to the center, while the lightest constituents such as water and nitrogen rose to the surface. At around 4.1 billion years ago, the surface of the molten earth cooled down enough to become solid land.

Four billion years ago, approximately a hundred million years after the emergence of solid land, life arose on Earth. We are not sure which of several hypothesized mechanisms accidentally created the first self-replicating molecule, most likely ribonucleic acid (RNA). It could have arisen from deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, from pools of organic soup, from alkaline seepages along the ocean floor, or from several other processes. However it happened, once this molecule was formed, it copied itself repeatedly. But not all copies were perfect, either through copying errors, or through environmental attacks on the molecules. The mini-environment in which the molecule first arose was soon filled with a number of slightly different versions of the original.

And evolution began.

Molecules with beneficial variations survived and reproduced in greater numbers. Those without did not. And the cycle repeated: variation due to copying errors or the environment, better survival and reproduction by those with certain beneficial traits, a new generation with variation, a new wave of survival and reproduction. Individual molecules usually did not change, but the population changed generation by generation, one tiny modification at a time.

One of the reasons it is sometimes hard to fathom how evolution works is that it is excruciatingly slow. One form does not change into another over one generation, or over a dozen. The time for the evolutionary step from the first living, replicating molecules to the first organisms that had cellular walls may have been on the order of a hundred million years. That means billions of generations of trial and error passed, tiny step by tiny step, until one-celled organisms emerged on the Earth.

Answer 7

Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. It sat around for almost 4 billion plus years before life showed up. Then when it did, it was just bacteria. Later algae, jellyfish things like that came along, then about 570 million years ago we had trilobites and sponges. 500 million years ago the first jawless fish existed. 430 million years first land plants showed up. 395 million years ago forests, amphibians and insects were on earth. 345 million years ago mosses, reptiles and winged insects developed. 280 million years ago cone bearing plants, ferns, fish and sea-living invertebrates show up and trilobites disappear. 225 million years ago first dinosaurs, mammals, modern fish and insects show up. 190 million years ago birds, palms and primative mammals are found. 136 million years ago placental mammals develop and dinosaurs die out. 65 million years ago horses, primates, and flowering plants thrive. 1.8 million years ago humans appear.

It didn't just happen, it took a very long time. Bacteria has been found in astroids, our first bacteria may have come from somewhere off the earth.

Answer 8

the first atmosphere called "primeval atmosphere" was made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapors... after the Earth's formation, it began to cool, and once it cooled enough the water vapor condensed to form the oceans and the CO2 (highly soluble in water) dissolved in the newly formed waters...so the oceans converted much of the co2 out of the air leaving it nitrogen rich, like it is today...
being soluble in water like co2 is, it broke up in the water and left the carbon to itself, as carbon is the most reactive element with several valence electron spots to connect to other elements or other carbons, it began linking together to create chains of carbon like methane, propane, etc. and eventually enough linked together to acquire an ability to reproduce themselves through division, this is apparently how the first life came about, when these chains of organisms willingly duplicated themselves... =\

i just like to say that God made it though... idk =) yay Creationism!!!

Answer 9

Out of thin air? No. Out of amino acids, which formed proteins. We amino acids in space! And we know we can make viruses out of them in the lab. It was just a matter of time.

Answer 10

i do not think life starts that way. life begins when a cell is able to do things by itself, not sure when. when i said a cell is able to do things by itself, it means the cell can look for its own food. of course, the first life is very fragile, but fear not! for at that time, only unicellular organism lives. and because of that, a cell divides, and in time, a cell becomes a smaller multiorganism, and anyway, life begins with a single cell.