Since the beginning...

In class, we spend time discussing what can potentially be done to make the world a better place, for humans, as well as other creatures we "share" this planet with. Since humans have been around, people have been staring "to the heavens" wondering where we came from. This eternal search for our original is what much of our society is based off of; whether it be science, religion, etc. I read a very interesting article discussing a possible way early life may have begun.Some say it may be creationism, and many others have had many other outrageous theories. Today, one man may have some sort of idea of how life jump started on Earth. The source of life that we may expect may be under different environmental conditions than we first thought.
Stanley Miller is a professor at the University of California. In 1972, Miller filled a vile with ammonia and cyanide. Scientists believed that these two chemicals were around in the early years of the earth. He checked the vile daily since 1972 and added dry ice. He added enough dry ice to keep it at 108 degrees Fahrenheit. He then cooled the mixture to an extremely freezing temperature, the temperature of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
The mixture of ammonia and cyanide which is usually colorless, strangely deepened to an amber color, and showed weblike cracks. After over 25 years, the mixture had combined, and under these certain conditions, had formed nucleobases, which are the building blocks of DNA, RNA, and amino acids.
There were some skeptics at first however, because some scientists believed that what formed happened as it thawed out. However, it was published after scientists were convinced that it the nucleobases were not formed as the product was thawing. “What was remarkable,” Bada says, “is that the yield in these frozen experiments was better, for some compounds, than it was with room-temperature experiments.”
Alan Schwartz, a biochemist from the University of Nijmegen, in the Netherlands took Miller’s research to the next level in 1982 and found that frozen cyanide in the presence of ammonia forms the nucleobase called acetone. All of this is incredible evidence of how life may have began here on earth, millions of years ago. If simple forms of life can be created in environmental conditions such as these cold temperatures, then our chance of finding life outside of this planet is even greater.
I would think life was created in some sort of room temperature or warm environment, however substantial evidence suggests that life may have began under more icy conditions. This article is important in our world today because it is one step toward the discovery of the origin of life.