Their legacy lasted all these billions of years only to be destroyed by nosy humans. I get the scientific benefit of discovering things like this and support the research efforts in general, but the very act of studying something ancient like this irrecoverably alters it, and that still makes an irrational part of me really sad.
If it makes you feel better nothing has any meaning, and preserving things is just humans trying to not feel the meaningless of it all.
“For most organisms on Earth, rocks are objects, not food.”
I can’t find a video I had about it, but the first organisms digested minerals and created a shitload of the other minerals we know and rely on today. It’s just a hell of a lot more efficient to consume life that already did the hard work. So, ancient lifeforms digested anything they could, starting with ‘Rock’. Sorry for lack of source.
However, cool discovery of a ‘directional’ rock digestion…
Makes sense, initial life forms had to do with what they had to work with. Couldn’t exactly get picky.
With initial life forms are we talking about LUCA or something that came a bit after? I thought the first life forms would feed from something in the water.
The key part is having an available energy gradient, and enough chemical variety for self replicating carbon chains to start forming. Pools of water are the dominant theory right now because the idea is that having solvent allows for free molecular movement, and if there was variation with them partially drying out, then they’d act as concentrators pushing these molecules closer together and making these reactions more propabable.
