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Want to impress your mates with your knowledge of the origins of life? The
question of just how we emerged from the primordial soup/slime/porridge/ aerosol
or whatever can always be relied upon to trigger an argument or two.

To bluff with confidence there’s nowhere better to start than Stanley
Miller, who set the ball rolling in 1953 when he made amino acids by recreating
a plausible set of conditions that might have been around on the early Earth.
Look at http://sciences.homepage.com/miller.htm for an interview with the
esteemed pioneer, where he talks about the problems of studying how life began,
and describes some of the theories going around. There’s also an animation of
his famous experiment.

If you’ve got a burning desire to tell the world about your own great
theory, head for www.us.net/life—where you could get rich into the
bargain. The Origin of Life Foundation is offering a $1.35 million prize
for anyone who can explain our beginnings. There are only a couple of snags:
your mechanism mustn’t break any physical laws, and has to be published in a
peer-reviewed science journal.

Which means that if Karl Sims entered, he would probably be unlucky. He
suggests (www.aec.at/prix/1991/E91gnA-panspermia.html) that plant seeds arrive
from outer space. Sims says that a seed landing on a barren planet apparently
develops into a cannon-shaped plant that grows and fires its seeds into orbit.
At www.panspermia.org they believe life has always existed, rendering discussion
of origins redundant.

Meanwhile, the discovery of bacterium-like fossils on a Martian meteorite
in 1996 caused great controversy over the possibility that the origin of life on
Earth might not be so unique after all. See NASA’s site
(www.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/flash/marslife/video.htm) for a rundown of the evidence
and a series of video clips.