Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Read Online Free PDF

droplets of liquid water formed and trickled down to fill the lowlands and the impact basins. Icebergs continued to fall from the sky, vaporizing on arrival. Torrents of extraterrestrial rain helped form the primeval seas.
    Organic molecules are composed of carbon and other atoms. All life on Earth is made from organic molecules. Clearly they had somehow to be synthesized
before
the origin of life
in order
for life to arise. Like water, organic molecules came both from down here and from up there. The early atmosphere was energized by ultraviolet light and the wind from the Sun, the flash and crackle of lightning and thunder, auroral electrons, intense early radioactivity, and the shock waves of objects plummeting groundward. When, in the laboratory, such energy sources are introduced into presumptive atmospheres of the primitive Earth, many of the organic building blocks of life are generated, and with astonishing ease.
    Life began near the end of the heavy bombardment. This is probably no coincidence The cratered surfaces of the Moon, Mars, and Mercury offer eloquent testimony to how massive and world-altering that battering was. Since the worldlets that have survived to our time—the comets and the asteroids—have sizeable proportions of organic matter, it readily follows that similar worldlets, also rich in organic matter but in much vaster numbers, fell on the Earth 4 billion years ago and may have contributed to the origin of life.
    Some of these bodies, and their fragments, burned up entirely as they plunged into the early atmosphere. Others survived unscathed, their cargoes of organic molecules safely delivered to the Earth. Smallorganic particles drifted down from interplanetary space like a fine sooty snow. We do not know just how much organic matter was delivered to and how much was generated on the early Earth, the ratio of imports to domestic manufactures. But the primitive Earth seems to have been heavily dosed with the stuff of life 4 —including amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), and nucleotide bases and sugars (the building blocks of the nucleic acids).
    Imagine a period hundreds of millions of years long in which the Earth is awash in the building blocks of life. Impacts are erratically altering the climate; temperatures are falling below the freezing point of water when the impact ejecta obscure the Sun, and then warming as the dust settles. There are pools and lakes undergoing wild fluctuations in conditions—now warm, bright, and bathed in solar ultraviolet light, now frozen and dark. Out of this varied and changeable landscape and this rich organic brew, life arises.
    Presiding over the skies of Earth at the time of the origin of life was a huge Moon, its familiar surface features being etched by mighty collisions and oceans of lava. If tonight’s Moon looks about as large as a nickel at arm’s length, that ancient Moon might have seemed as big as a saucer. It must have been heartbreakingly lovely. But it was billions of years to the nearest lovers.
    We know that the origin of life happened quickly, at least on the time scale by which suns evolve. The magma ocean lasted until about 4.4 billion years ago. The time of the permanent or near-permanent dust pall lasted a little longer. Giant impacts occurred intermittently for hundreds of millions of years after that. The largest ones melted the surface, boiled away the oceans, and flushed the air off into space. This earliest epoch of Earth history is, appropriately, called Hadean, hell-like. Perhaps life arose a number of times, only to be snuffed out by a collision with some wild, careening worldlet newly arrived from the depths of space. Such “impact frustration” of the origin of life seems to have continued until about 4 billion years ago. But by 3.6 billion years ago, life had exuberantly come to be.
    ——
     
    The Earth is a vast graveyard, and every now and then we dig up one of our ancestors. The oldest known fossils, you might