Life.
The biggest mystery.
What is Life?
When did it happen?
How did it surge?
Did it happen in our planet?
Or did it come from other worlds?
This is Gerardo Garrido
And I travelled to Iceland in the company of Ricardo Amils.
Ricardo is an astrobiologist, someone that searches for life forms out of our planet.
He is my guide to a world he only can see.
He is a detective of the origin of life who searches for clue in the most hostile places.
We will visit infernal ponds surrounded by sulphur.
Lethal lakes.
Poisonous rivers.
The heart of glaciers. And the surroundings of an active volcano.
And even we will go underground to find answers in the darkness.
THE DARK WORLD
LIFE AND WATER
Our planet boils in life.
There could be as 10 million animal and plant species living with us, according to science.
But all of them need water for living.
Our journey to know the origin of life drive us to the encounter with water.
Why is water so important for life?
You and me are made by water in 80 percent.
Water is essential for life. Without water, there is no life. It is the best marker for life.
That is the reason people search for life on Mars.
Life is a solvent. It makes possible that systems can interchange molecules.
You need a solvent for working.
Water is the most powerful solvent in Nature.
It allows the movement of this microscopic creature.
And makes its metabolism to function.
Water makes possible the miracle of Life.
But Life is much more than water.
We drive to the cost in the middle of a hard rain.
Weather give us a stop and we meet the beautiful Icelandic horses.
Life seems very easy to distinguish.
And we know something is alive by just see it.
Along our journey we meet many dead seagulls.
And many chicks they do not how to fly.
To decide between the living and the inanimate seems very easy.
But we will find it is not easy at all.
Ricardo, would you explain what is life?
Minds so privileged as Lynn Margulis, or the Nobel Prize Schrödinger wrote books
trying to establish the definition of life, and they failed.
This is a problem for Biology. We can separate and analyze the components of life, we know all macromolecules inside cells...
We can synthesize them ...but if we mix them, like does not surge.
Scientists can not make life in their laboratories.
The Frankenstein myth is out of reach of science.
Many believe life surged in an ocean like the one we have in front.
Could it happened spontaneously in a place like this billion of years ago?
The classic models suggest life originated in submarine volcanoes
where gases and basic components, by chemical reactions,produced the bricks of life.
The more we back on time, the more diffuse the line gets between the inanimate and the living.
To show it, Ricardo brings me to an extraordinary place, built in basalt column, where things are not what they suppose to be.
Are virus alive?
This is a debatable question for virologists.
For some they are alive, for others not.
But virus can not reproduce by themselves, what is a fundamental property of life.
And here we hace a nice sample.
These are minerals, basalt, mineral structures.
Minerals can reproduce by themselves, but they are not alive.
This is a invisible Universe in everything, earth, the seas, the atmosphere.
A single gram of soil can contain a billion of bacteria.
But if the first cells appear in the ocean, they left no clues.
And Ricardo suggests that perhaps life could not happen there.
To solve this mystery, we have to travel to another place, that is very different.
A place that still preserve the conditions when life appeared.
Iniciation.
Before the trip, we decide to take a rest in Reikiavik.
Few things are better than talking about science while listening jazz and blues.
After, while we are taking a good hot soap, Ricardo talk about the primordial soup of life.
And he mentions the work of one of his colleagues, Dave Deamer.
Deamer has investigated for decades one of the biggest mysteries.
Hod did the first living cells manage to protect themselves?
Deamer discovered that the oceans did not provide the conditions for the making of membranes.
Where did it happen?
The next day, we begin our trip to an extraordinary place, searching for answers.
Close to the highlands of Iceland, we find a world strongly affected by wild winds.
It's very cold, but fumaroles around us exhale heat and vapor.
In their borders, Nature draws beautiful pictures that seem impressionist paintings, with an hypnotic attraction.
Abd we finally arrive at a precious blue colored hot pond.
Did life start in a place like this?
160 years ago, Darwin wrote a letter to a colleague that described the possibility that life in a place like this
A hot lagoon like this, that contained the different components necessary for life to emerge.
Ricardo, which ingredients are necessary for life to surge?
The fundamental elements for life are nucleic acids, information, and proteins, that make the cellular components
And specially the membranes, they are the barriers that separates the living things from the rest.
This is essential to concentrate the elements inside than can work.
My colleague and friend Dave Deamer, from the California University, has been working here.
He has investigated, under the conditions we find here, how the components of life surged, and very specially, the membranes.
What if we call him, and talk about all these issues?
It is an excellent idea.
Lets talk with him.
Hello David. How are you?
I know you had been here taking samples to make your experiments about membrane synthesis.
Surely you enjoyed a much better weather, not like now, with all this strong winds that make almost impossible to work.
Happy to meet you Ricardo.
This morning, probably your evening.
Wellcome to Iceland.
I stayed there last summer for a couple of weeks.
I can guarantee your experience is going to be spectacular.
I walked along numerous hot springs.
Is one of the most beautiful places to find them.
While I was walking it came some of the ideas that are now part of my research.
You are in this amazing landscape of a volcanic island.
coming up from hot magma.
underneath driving the volcanism that is just constant in the Icelandic background.
Deamer is convinced that, in a site like this, life was cooked.
Life is written by nucleic acids, instructions
They are instructions manuals for microscopic organisms,
Icelandic horses.
Us.
Every living being has its written genetic code.
But this amazing amount of information is packed in these very long molecules.
If we unroll all the DNA of a person, we could travel to the moon and back to Earth about 150.000 times.
How did this extraordinary molecules emerge?
It must had a source of energy capable of making polymers.
And we are all familiar with polymers.
Polyester, polystyrene, polyethylene.
I suspect the shirt that I am wearing contains polyethylene.
Believe or not, your nucleic acids are also polyesters.
It is extraordinary that the ester linkages, that hold nucleic acids together
To make these long linear molecules are nothing but a single molecule bond called ester.
Imagine that this finger is a molecule of acid and the other is an alcohol
If I put them together, it makes an ester bond.
What we are doing in the laboratory and in the field is making ester bonds.
We take shelter of the strong winds to eat something hot.
So these hot springs we saw are similar to this soup.
And this soup could contain the temperature, the water and the necessary ingredients...
That is, what we have here is very similar to...
...to the cuisine of Life.
The cuisine of life, how it emerged.
And Deamer actually believes that the origin of life is an act of cuisine.
To have the adequate ingredientes to make life possible.
Deamer formed a singular team with his colleague, Dr. Bruce Damer, at California University in Santa Cruz.
They tested their findings in the laboratory at places like Iceland and New Zealand.
These pioneers reproduce, in a primitive Nature, the chemical reactions that made life possible billion of years ago.
I was in Hell Cape, north of New Zealand.
We made experiments there try to reproduce what we see in our laboratory.
Is the next stage of research in our research.
See if what we got in the laboratory actually can work in these sites.
We call analog sites to what the Earth had before life.
Four billion years ago at the beginning of life on Earth.
Life emerged under two conditions.
It needed very long molecules to hold the information
And it learned to protect itself from the outside by developing a membrane.
Strong winds outside, cold, extreme conditions...
Despite of this, you insist that life, something we consider a fragile thing,
Life is on the knive edge, is very close to death.
Despite these extreme conditions, you are convinced that life emerged in a place like this.
There is no doubt life emerged in extreme conditions.
In the time of life origins, the planet has a strong volcanic activity.
The conditions were very hard.
But it is not true that life is a fragile thing.
Life adapts very easily to extreme conditions
Today we have found that is associated to volcanic activity.
Darwin predicted it.
In his Beagle voyages, he visited salinas, very salty places, and observed life in those.
And he deduced the following.
If life exists in these conditions
It should be life in the coldest places
It should be life at the top of the mountains.
And it should be life in the interior of the Earth.
It must happened a physics to form things as ordinary as simples as soup bubbles.
Molecules which are fatty acids in the original soup. Everybody use soup from centuries ago.
Fatty acids can make membranes we call bubbles.
Those same fatty acids in water they produce what we call microscopic membranes.
We call them lipid vesicles or liposomes.
And occurs spontaneously.
I happens in the laboratory and in the field.
If lipids are presents, polymers are encapsulated.
So that is the way it happened.
Very long molecules that hold information assembled...
And they were protected by membranes similar to soup bubbles.
And life made its way.
Ricard take us to a place where life confronts extreme conditions.
It's another World.
Lost Worlds.
Smelling to rotten eggs and sulphur is everywhere.
For this detective that searches for answers,
...the place is almost a time travel where smog threatens to erase all details to our cameras.
We are at Seltun, Iceland
One of the best extreme places to study the origin of life.
And here we can see organisms adapted to live in such extreme conditions
H igh temperature, very low acidity, and even high concentration of heavy metals.
We are surrounded by vapor and acid everywhere.
What can survive in these poisonous ponds?
Here we can see algae...
Easy to identify by the green color of the chlorophyll
They are surely making photosynthesis in an extreme environment like this.
These are boiling waters and very acid.
The probe of Ricardo reveals their temperature, more than 84 celsius centigrades.
Their corrosive power destroy metals.
What it can survive nearby?
We have here a nice example of the extreme conditions of this volcanic area.
We can see, in water at high temperature, it is boiling because of the volcanic activity
We see patches of green algae that are growing in the surroundings.
The are probably taking advantage of the heat and the emissions of CO2
And the hydrogen sulfide that is oxidized, making all the surroundings of sulphuric acid.
After this finding, smog invades again this Lost World.
Ricard talks about an acid lake that is very important for the origin of life.
We can barely distinguish its shore because of the bad weather.
Despite the rain and the winds, the team is determined to shoot.
Smog is everywhere.
Lethal Lake
While we are walking, Ricardo tells me an extraordinary story.
This lake is lethal for most living things
But not for all.
Next day, the smog vanishes, and we decide to get a try.
We could not imagine the marvelous we would find.
The turquoise color waters of the Graenavath lake shines as a precious stone.
We are at the Graenavath lake, Iceland. Ricardo, why you drove us here?
You can see this is a lake that has a very special color.
It is acid.
It has a very low acidity because of the volcanic activity
It is in a volcanic cone.
We have found here a microorganism, a bacteria called Acidiphilium.
It can live with and without oxygen.
So here is the home of a living beings that possibly do not have oxygen
They are surrounded by sulphur, and despite of all, they get comfort.
This is a predilect place for them.
And the most interest of all, this lake is a Mars analog.
The lake is in a volcanic cone, the minerals, the kind of life that lives here...
It is a place that shows how was Mars a long time ago.
While we are walking, I imagine this could be a Martian lake.
A lake born from a Volcano many millions of years ago.
This strange bacteria could survive in the red planet.
We have a time machine to travel to the past of the primitive Earth.
Being the witness of how a volcano is born.
Six months later.
I have always thought bacteria are smarter than we believe.
They have dominated our world since billion of years ago.
It seems crazy, but there is no doubt the evolved into us.
And the volcanoes cooked the necessary ingredients to produce them.
While I am walking, I imagine I see a primitive Earth.
And sometimes I think bacteria could have emerged in similar landscapes of other worlds.
There is another possibility for the origin of life, apart from the vapor of hot springs.
The Cold.
Life that came from the Cold.
Did life emerged in the ice?
In temperatures below zero?
Ricardo proposes to travel to one of the biggest glaciers in the world.
And while we drive to the north, he tells me an extraordinary story.
An experiment that started in a laboratory, where a Chemist called Stanley Miller
And his pupil, Jeffrey Bada, put ammonia and cyanid in a test tube, and froze it for 25 years.
I did not know about this, until Stanley told me while we had dinner.
He mentioned a set of tubes with a mixture of ammonia and cyanide freezes during 25 years.
I almost dropped my fork. I told him, what? After 25 years, it is time to stop!
The first thing I saw is that the tubes were brown.
We found amino acids and nucleic bases.
We never expected them to surge at -25 C below zero.
Even there was a test tube that was at -75 celsius degrees.
The cold sculpted the bricks of Life.
Nucleic bases, the genetic code.
Also aminoacd, that build up proteins
Nature sculpts surprising forms in the surroundings.
A grand piano cover made on ice and battled by the sea waves.
The head of a jaguar.
Once Inside this glaciar cave, I remember what happened in those frozen tube test.
Ice, water and the passing time.
If 25 years of intense cold were enough to produce some of the bricks of life...
What the million of years were able to create?
The evolution created us, organic intelligence forms.
We arrive at Jökulsárlón, one of the biggest glaciar lakes in the world.
It is easy to let your eyes wander in this iced landscape.
In this moment I understand that the ice open doors to new worlds.
Fantastic frozen worlds where everything could be possible.
We are at Jökulsárlón, an spectacular glacial lake.
This is a particular ecosystem, with an analogy of life in another planets, isn't it Ricardo?
We are at Iceland, very volcanic, so it is very likely that under that glacier, it would be enough heat to melt ice
And produce subterranean lakes equivalent to those you could find in Europa, a moon of Jupiter, or Encedalus.
Distant words where, despite the cold, they could harbor oceans under ice caps of kilometers of thickness.
Probes have detected in Europa, one of the Jupiter moons, plumes of what seems water vapor.
Like gigantic geysers that make its way through kilometers of ice.
How liquid water can occur in those cold planets?
Where the heat does come from?
In Europa, and probably in Encedalus,
It is not the heat by itself, is the eccentricity of the orbit of the moon around Jupiter,.
that produces very energetic tides.
It is not the heat by itself, is the eccentricity of the orbit of the moon around Jupiter,.
The tides of Jupiter are very powerful I guess, much more than the tides of the moon here.
It is not only the size what matters, is the eccentricity of the orbit.
The type of twist of the moon.
I understand, is a very eccentric orbit
If life exists in those world, they are presumed to be bacteria, Ricardo affirms.
Bacteria have been isolated in the ice of the glaciers, and even in the ice of the drinks we take.
But even the simplest bacteria is a gigantic step forward in evolution.
During this trip, a question it is on my mind.
How long took life to create a humble bacteria?
After exploring beaches of black sand,
glacial lakes
hot springs
and volcanic ashes, Ricardo had a surprise for me.
Ricardo, you head is in somewhere else.
You are right. Iceland is fascinating, its hot spring, the world of sulphur.
There is no doubt it is very interesting concerning the origin of life.
But I am going to bring you to another place.
Where are we going now?
First I have to show you something.
What do you see here?
I tell you Ricardo, this is lunch time, and what I see here is a dish of macaroni with tomato.
This is not tomato macaroni.
This is hematite, the product of extraction of energy by microorganism that live in certain conditions.
Hematite, this is the first time I hear it.
Hematite is an iron oxide.
It is produced when bacteria oxidizes pyrite.
Pyrite is made by volcanoes.
But this still seem to me tomato macaroni.
What would you say about how old are these microorganisms?
No idea, Ricardo, I do not know.
The recent research that produced this image estimate that the age is 4.2 billion years ago.
4.2 billion years? They are almost as old as the same Earth!
Earth has about 4.5 billion years old!
Right. So what it follows is that life emerged very quickly on our planet.
Yes, it took about 300 million years to emerge.
Ricardo, where these structures were found?
These tubules were found in Quebec, in Canada.
So are we going there?
No. I am going to bring you to a much more interesting place where this phenomenon is happening while we are talking.
So let's go!
Río Tinto, a Spanish town in the province of Huelva
holds one of the biggest copper mine in open sky.
I am the special envoy of Ricardo to track here a critical clue about the origin of life.
Life burns energy.
And it produces waste.
Fingerprints.
I am searching for the artists that made these fascinating tomato macaroni.
They could be the oldest inhabitants, almost as old as our planet.
Ricardo wants me to explore the river where the mine take its name.
El Río Tinto
It is the most enigmatic place I have never seen.
Blood River
Sulphur smelling is very intense.
A surprise awaits in every step.
The river makes a pond.
Its waters are of a very intense dark red color.
It is like the blood that comes from the interior of the Earth.
Without fishes, frogs, or aquatic insects.
Only the sound of the hot breeze against the pine acículas.
Ricardo recombined not to touch these acid waters.
They burn like sulphuric acid.
There are curious yellow lumps like popcorns.
Nevertheless, I detect some life in the waters.
Vegetable filaments that wave.
Green lumps of algae in the nearby rocks similar to what we found in Iceland.
After walking dozens of kilometers,
my suspicions are confirmed.
The river maintains intact its personality along its course.
Its smelling and color.
Even downstream, while we are approaching to the river mouth, at the end of the day.
Ricard explained that the river maintains its low acidity along its 100 kilometer course.
Even in heavy raining.
It is an astounding river, unique. And must be preserved.
I have never seen anything like this in all my life.
Ricardo let me a map to reach the birth of the river the following morning.
I follow the creek or red and yellow waters.
I take a way to my left to go up.
And a reach a debris hill of stones.
Is it here where this mystery is born?
Ricardo is back again among the ruins of the old mine installations in Zarandas.
A site that seems the scene of a dystopic film, surrounded by destruction.
Reencounter
Also, the place we meet again.
Iron oxide is present everywhere.
But its effects are even more impressive in the oldest train machines, railways and wagons.
Iron is corroded in such a grade I have never seen before.
A world dominated by corrosion.
The universe of Iron
Hello Ricardo. From the greenish blue Iceland landscape
you bring me to one of the sites more oxidized of the Earth.
I promised you. I told you I will bring you to a place where there is action on iron.
You are seeing here all the oxidized material from trains because of the action of microorganisms.
For many years people ignored them.
They did not know that this oxidation was produced by biology.
But today everything is well documented and researched.
Amazing! So it is not the oxygen the culprit, but the bacteria.
That is correct.
Lets see some of them.
I am going to show you my river.
The Man and the River.
Ricardo is the scientific guardian of this extraordinary river
Thanks to it he made a career as an astrobiologist.
The River Guardian
He has the keys of its secrets.
As I suspected, the Río Tinto is too far to be considered a dead river.
This river is amazing, but I can not see fishes, frogs or birds.
You will never see them.
Obviously this is a river that does not have the type of life you could find in any other river.
Here there are only microorganisms, they are impossible to see.
The reason is because all the eucariotas, excepting the algae you can see,
They can not live because of the acidity and heavy metal content of the waters of the river.
The classic idea is that this is a polluted river.
A byproduct of the industrial pollution that comes from the mine.
But this is the best way to refuse this argument.
In the oldest terraces of the river
similar of what we are seeing here, in Berrocal
has been dated, and they are 8 millions old.
Eight millions years ago there were no miners taking metals in any mine of the world.
So is there any manner to know if the river is polluted or not?
The important issue is to find the origin of the river.
We have been searching for it in the last years
And we demonstrated that the river is a by product of a subterranean bioreactor.
Where microorganisms that burn metallic sulfides to obtain energy
From the pyrite Iberian deposits, that are very rich on pyrite.
They are very happy! They eat the pyrite and then they defecate sulphuric acid and ferric ion.
and this is what you see in the river.
So we can conclude that under all of this,
there is a biological reactor, a fabric of life.
That is right.
Is what we call the Dark World. It is a kind of life that does not need sunlight or photosynthesis.
Something we see that happens in the surface of the planet.
But this is happening under our feet, in the underground.
And this is the Dark World you talked about in Iceland.
That is correct, and that is why I have brought you here, to show my Río Tinto.
Algae are the most visible signal of life in these waters.
This is a multi parametric probe.
We are going to measure the acidity, the pH.
We can se that the pH is maintained along the course of the river.
We are just in the middle of the course of the river.
After we can go where the river is born and measure its pH.
Put the probe in the water.
The pH is 2.5.
Shake it a little and again,
Yes, the pH is 2.5.
Ricardo tells me about other important survivors, apart from algae and bacteria.
In 2022, his team of Center Of Molecular Biology Severo Ochoa (CSIC) took samples in different parts of the river.
We sent the samples to Frank Fox, one of the best micro cinematographers of the world, at Konz, Germany.
Unfortunately, the samples were delayed and remain in obscurity during al most a week.
First results were discouraging.
Skeletal landscapes of dead algae and dying diatomea.
But...surrounded by bacteria!
The autthentic queens of Río Tinto.
Some of them make twists
like microscopic snakes.
Despite the problems, Frank did not abandon.
He added some water and exposed the samples to sunlight.
Gradually, superior life started to flourish.
An Euglena, an algae that resembles an animal, makes elegantly its way.
A single amoeba tries to engulf the skeletal of a diatomea.
This one has got a double prize, living algae.
And a curious encounter between an amoeba and an Euglena, where no one wins.
Within days, life start to flourish.
These are ciliates of the genre Euplotes.
They seem creatures from another planet.
These protozoa move vividly and fast.
This is a bombproof couple, never separate.
Others explore the algae, like fishes swimming along coral reefs.
Someone like to grow peacefully.
Euglenas start to form vibrant colonies.
And step by step, diversity grows.
Heliozoa. They seem miniature stars creating rays.
Even more than three months, some of the inhabitants of this river refuse to die.
Under Frank's microscope, we witness the spectacle of the life of the Rio Tinto.
As anyone has seen before.
The Dark World.
In our next move, we approach one of the gates of the Dark World.
A gigantic crater of a diameter of 1200 meters and 300 meters deep.
One of the biggest mines in the open sky of the world.
Corta Atalaya.
The terraces of 12 meters high shine in a brilliant orange in the morning.
But our interest is below these dark waters
The Dark World.
To what depth can life survive here?
This is the geological section of an flood mine
You can see the level of the freatic water.
This is the level of the water inside and that allows microorganisms to live under.
What depth? Our team of the Astrobiology Center drilled a hole of 620 meters near here.
And we have found life. And this is not the limit. We are convinced there is life even deeper.
It is believed that the limit of life is the temperature.
Temperature? So what is the temperature limit for living beings?
In the laboratory it is possible to cultivate microorganisms at 132 celsius centigrate.
That means you need a pressure cooker to cultivate them.
Mine is now a tourism attraction.
But Ricardo proposes me another gate for this World that no one knows like him.
And this is the site of our last experiment.
The birth of Río Tinto.
The threshold of an inaccesible universe.
Put it a bit deeper.
The pH is only 2.
This is much lower that the acidity we found in the intermediate part of the river.
There is no river in the world like this.
More than 100 kilometers of waters that maintains an extraordinary acidity.
They are only the tip of the iceberg of the Dark World.
So can we conclude that the river is not polluted?
The river is not born polluted. This is the cotton test.
Obviously when it cross the mine area there could be interactions with the mine residues.
But here, this is pristine. This comes from the underground.
So let's go into this Dark World we have talked about.
We go through the rock pores.
There is no light and oxygen.
We are now more than 600 meters deep.
It's getting hotter.
Billions of bacteria burn the iron of the rocks.
Some of them learned to breath nitrates.
The Dark Wolrd is overwhelmed by enormous pressures.
And the time runs slower.
Some bacteria could divide perhaps each 1000 years.
Many rules of biology are broken in this world, Ricardo tells me.
Cooperation is more important than competence.
Everybody are necessary in this universe.
Life creates the conditions that allow its existence.
Collaboration among different species was vital for the origin of life, a prediction of biologist Lynn Margulis.
And we, the powerful human beings, could not live without the help of these bacteria.
When it started everything?
After getting back from this Dark World, where time stops.
Our tour in the mine train gets a very special meaning.
This is not only a train that show us the old times of the big mine copper industry.
These are the tomato macaroni you show me at Iceland and you promise me to show them here, in Río Tinto.
So we go. This train will drive us to the sites where they are producing these kind of structures right now.
Now I see this is a journey to the same origins of life.
This is a snapshot of something that could happened more than 4 billion years ago.
So this train compress the long history of life on Earth in about only one year.
January, 1. The Earth is born.
Around February 25, first bacteria emerge.
They have dominated our world.
The first animals appear on November.
Dinosaurs dissapereared about December 25, at Christmas Day.
And we appeared in the last 15 minutes of the year.
I admire the Rio Tinto making its way in the pine forest.
And I wonder if there were others blood rivers when life started.
Blood rivers boosted by subterranean kingdoms of bacteria.
Other Dark Worlds.
Other worlds
Iron.
An ancestral energy source.
While we walk, Ricardo suggests to raise our look to another world.
Mars.
The red planet.
A world rusted to the bone.
Iceland, Rio Tinto
It seems that the ghost of Mars follows us everywhere.
You should know we are now walking over the best Mars analog.
Why?
Mars is the red planet. And Río Tinto, you know what is its color because of its name,Tinto.
Both share the same red color because of the oxidized iron that is prevalent in both.
Spheres of hematite have been found on Mars.
The same iron oxide that is present in Río Tinto.
At one Martian crater hill, the Perseverance rover found something.
Signs of ancient water.
Iron oxides.
And mysterious black spots
that suggest that microscopic life flourished from Martian underground.
May be by burning iron minerals?
So do you believe we will find life on Mars?
Not in the surface, as water dissapeared since many million of years ago.
But we have found life in the underground here in Earth. So why not in Mars?
The life we have on Earth, could it had came from Mars?
If life emerged on Mars, an meteoritic impact from Mars could have brought the life to Earth.
But if Mars and the Earth are the same old, about 4.5 billion years
then life appeared faster on Mars.
We have a difficulty here, as we know that life emerged on Earth very soon.
There was no room for this difference.
We should start to look further than the solar system.
So life comes from much further.
It could come from much further.
From a past of four billions years ago, we travel to the future.
A future perhaps without humans beings.
Specially if we make this planet inhabitable for us.
While we walk on this dystopian landscape, I wonder about life and time.
We believe bacteria are sketches of a primitive life.
But in fact they are very sophisticated structures.
In the world of robotics, bacteria would be very advanced artificial intelligences.
Were 300 million years enough to allow them surging from chaos?
Can we imagine this time period?
Astronomer Fred Hoyle believed life came from outer space.
Do you think life was very easy to form?
I do not think it was easy at all to form.
It think I don't believe... it was easy at all to form.
I think the forms of life that you would get 3.8 billion of years ago in Greenland
would be not much different from the life we have here today, the bacterial life.
He believed that the probability of life emerging at random on Earth
was almost zero.
As if one tornado destroying an hangar with all the separated pieces of a 747 jumbo plane
could assemble them in a plane capable of flying.
I decided to phone our friend Dave Deamer to ask him about it.
Regarding Fred Hoyle metaphor of the tornado and the 747 airliner.
Hoyle gots stuck with the idea that entropy and disorganization always increases, no matter what.
Here is a counter example.
If we add a solution of salt and sugar a shelve with a cap bottle, nothing would happen in a million years.
But if I take off the cap and let the solution evaporate
at some point crystals begin to form.
Each crystal is an example of an entropy decreasing to a minimum.
Another example is a soup solution
If the soup solution is undisturbed, it would sit forever.
But if I add a little energy by blowing air with a straw
beautiful soup bubbles form and float away.
These are examples of self assembly.
and it seems obvious to me that self assembly proceses played an essential role in the origin of life.
I imagine now blood rivers like Río Tinto, but in primitive landscapes of Mars.
And perhaps in another worlds.
Ricardo, after talking so much about the origin of life
what do you think how could be the end?
We could talk about the end of our species.
Specially if we behave in the way we do today.
But at the end of life I am convinced microorganisms will persist.
So the human species becomes extinct and bacteria will survive us.
That is the idea.
The end of our species drive us to the beginning.
We need to raise our look to other worlds
Sites very different to our home, the Earth.
Searching for answers.
Where perhaps life is now the rule.
and not the exception.