Life of the Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 126

persist today, and have entered our thinking about the origins of life
on Earth. How could life emerge from lifeless matter? What possible
mix of chemicals (water in particular), energy, and chance could pro-
duce the complexity of even the simplest living things? The late British
astronomer Fred Hoyle, who was notorious for taking controversial
positions on many scientific issues, proposed that life evolving in the
oceans of Earth was akin to a tornado ripping through a junkyard with
all the disassembled bits of a Boeing 747, and assembling them into a
flying Jumbo Jet. In fact Hoyle had his own agenda to push, because he
favoured the idea of panspermia: the notion that life arrived on Earth
from outer space. His jumbo jet analogy leaned more on the pre-Redi
idea of spontaneous generation than on a reasoned scientific analysis
of the evidence. In effect, Hoyle was suggesting that life needed to be
assembled in one sudden step. The journey to life, though, was not so
straightforward.
On Earth there are certain characteristics that apply to the smallest
microbe and to the most complex human. Life is self-organized, and
is composed of a complicated array of structures and chemicals, some
of which are used to extract energy from the surrounding environ-
ment. Life is able to store information, reproduce, and pass on its
information to future generations. We could add that life is assembled
with a high degree of order from a small number of building blocks
assembled using the genetic code of our cells. This code directs the
cell to grow into a human ear, or an ear of corn. In this way life resem-
bles the spoken words of a Shakespearean play, brought into exist-
ence via arrays of 26 letters that may be meaningless in themselves,
but once assembled into words convey an almost infinite variety of
information.
Yet, when we look down a microscope at a unicellular organism,
darting with its propeller-like flagella across its own tiny ocean held
within a petri dish, these simple explanations of life fade away. How