10 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries In Science

8. Where Did Life Come From?

We can be pretty sure by now that life has arisen on planet Earth. The only question is how?

How do you get from a random chain of chemicals to you, reading this? There are plenty of theories.

Essentially, at some point nearly 4 billion years ago, strings of molecules came together in even bigger strings of molecules, creating amino acids which eventually formed DNA and ultimately life. This is all great, but nobody is quite sure how or why that happened in the first place.

Some think that lightning striking the primordial soup was enough to kick start the whole affair, some think that the organic molecules were delivered from meteors (although that just explains how they got here, not how they formed), some think life originated in deep-sea vents at the bottom of the ocean. Some think that metabolism came first, some think genes came first.

This is just the thing, everybody has a theory, but nobody knows for sure. The main problem so many scientists seem to be having is that the formation of life just seems so unlikely, particularly to the extent that we see around us today.