Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Because you'd need microscopic physical evidence of something that happened nearly 4 billion years ago. And you'd need a fuck ton of it to definitively say that it was one super cell and not several separate instances of it.
And on a geological time scale, that evidence has almost certainly been erased.
We might be able to figure out the conditions that caused life to form, but to know whether it was a singular event or not requires an extremely high burden of proof.
Even with a time machine it would be extremely difficult to get that level of evidence. Even if we could recreate the conditions that led to life forming and create a cell out of a soup of amino acids, that still wouldn't answer the question.
Sure. I agree that it's a very hard proposition, but I'm sure scientists thought going to space was a hard proposition before we did it. Photographing the black hole at the center of our galaxy was a hard proposition until we did it.
Our collective incredulity doesn't seem to have prevented science from overcoming seemingly impossible feats, thus far, and it's that relentless desire to explore and discover that leaves me thinking it's more likely that we just don't know these things yet.
There's a difference between a hard proposition and something being within the realm of possibility. There are some things that we will never be able to know for certain, and this is one of those.
Hell, the cells that we all evolved from might not even be the first life to form on the planet.
It's not a subject like astronomy that better instruments will be able to improve our knowledge. This is a history question, not a scientific question, and you can't answer those questions if evidence doesn't exist.