The Speculist

Were Our Ancestors Little Balloons?

Physicists have created gaseous blobs that display many of the characteristics of living cells, raising possible new insights into the origin of life.

The researchers studied environmental conditions similar to those that existed on the Earth before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionised gases called plasmas to form in the atmosphere.

They inserted two electrodes into a chamber containing a low-temperature plasma of argon - a gas in which some of the atoms have been split into electrons and charged ions. They applied a high voltage to the electrodes, producing an arc of energy that flew across the gap between them, like a miniature lightning strike.

This arc produced little balls of gas that began to eat (by taking on more gas), grow, and reproduce (by splitting). Is it possible that this is how life began? Mircea Sanduloviciu and his colleagues, who conducted these experiments, think these blobs could point to a new explanation for the origin of life. Others are less convinced.

That view is "stretching the realms of possibility," says Gregoire Nicolis, a physical chemist at the University of Brussels. In particular, he doubts that biomolecules such as DNA could emerge at the temperatures at which the plasma balls exist.

Of course, that doesn't mean that life couldn't have started this way, only that there would have been a number of steps between the origin of life and the emergence of DNA. In the interim, conditions would have had to change sufficiently to allow for the creation of DNA.