@ThePolymathOfficial

1 day ago

- In 1954, Stanley Miller an American chemist successfully performed a landmark experiment on the origin of life. The Miller-Urey experiment was the first ever to produce the manmade building blocks of life - amino acids. He produced amino acids from inorganic molecules and a spark of electricity.

-The scientific community now has realized that the Miller-Urey experiment is one of the most successful experiments on the origin of life. It established the fact that electricity may have played a vital role in the creation of life on earth.

-While I was reading about all this I thought that a few lightning strikes cannot be enough to provide all the phosphorous needed for the emergence of life on earth. So I decided to find out just how many lightning strikes would be needed for preparing the recipe of creating life.

-As I dug deeper I was embarrassed to realize just how little I know about my planet my home. Today, about 560 million lightning bolts flash over our planet earth every year.

-when carbon dioxide increases the land surface gets warmer, and stronger warm upward currents of air are more likely to produce lightning. I am telling about this connection between carbon dioxide and lightning because 4 billion years ago, the earth’s atmosphere had a significant amount of Carbon-dioxide. And therefore, the earth was hotter and more prone to storms.

-Yale University researchers calculated that 4 billion years ago it is likely that because of a lot of carbon dioxide anywhere between 1 billion to 4 billion bolts flashed every year over our young planet earth. When lightning strikes kept hitting our planet for let us say over 1 billion years - they gave anywhere from 100 to 11000 kilograms of phosphorous every year. And that is enough phosphorus for the life to begin its journey on earth.

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