Where did life on Earth begin?

Here are some quotes from a scientific article that reflects two of the dominant theories regarding the origin of life on earth.

The First Possiblity

"Some microorganisms thrive in the scalding, highly acidic hot springs environments like those found today in Iceland, Norway and Yellowstone National Park. The same goes for deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like vents form where seawater comes into contact with magma on the ocean floor, resulting in streams of super heated plumes. The microorganisms that live near such plumes have led some scientists to suggest them as the birthplaces of Earth’s first life forms."

A Second Possibility:

"Organic molecules may also have formed in certain types of clay minerals that could have offered favorable conditions for protection and preservation. This could have happened on Earth during its early history, or on comets and asteroids that later brought them to Earth in collisions. This would suggest that the same process could have seeded life on planets elsewhere in the universe."

Stated more simply:

Darwin's theory of biological evolution suggests that all life on earth may have originated from a single, relatively simple reproducing creature living in the distant past.

The upshot of this is that ‘scientifically’, it would appear that somewhere in the distant past, there was a unitary source of life on earth. If that is the case, lets simply consider the logic.

You are alive today. You have parents. You would not be here if one of those parents had died before you were conceived. That is a simple fact.

Your parents had parents, and their parents had parents. That unbroken line of parent/child survival must have been maintained, or, again, you would not be here. Again, this is a simple fact.

The question is how far back can you trace this direct lineage? To Rome, to ancient Egypt, to early homo sapiens? It should be obvious, that no matter how far back you take this, wherever you land, the key individual that you land on had parents, and they had parents. This sequence MUST logically and practically extend back directly from you through historical times through the Siderian, Jurassic, Paleogene, Paleoproterozoic, Phanerozoic ages, and, ultimately, back to that protein rich pool where life likely originated. There is no other logical possibility.

If in that entire chain of life, one parent had died before its offspring was conceived, you and I would not be here. Again, this is a simple, unavoidable, fact.

Pretty amazing, eh?

But, lets consider this whole process from another perspective.

What if we go back to that original source of life and follow it forward. Once again, we move logically and scientifically through time. However, in this instance, we see that those earliest, shared parents gave birth to all of the forms of life that exist on earth today. Every individual living thing on earth, including every insect, every fish, every amphibian, every reptile, every bird, and every living mammal including your family, the man/woman you love, your children, the people in your community, in your country, etc., must, by definition, be able to trace their origin back to that original, seminal life form.

Once again, given the unavoidable logic implicit in these current theories regarding the origins of life on this planet, this is a simple, logical conclusion.

My teacher, Geshe Lama Kaldan, always told me, “Every living thing on this earth is your loving parent and your loving brother or loving sister!”

I always assumed that he was speaking metaphorically. However in the face of this distant, single origin of life, he was speaking ‘factually’.

If you ever sit with that one and consider carefully the implications for you as a part of this web of life, as a part of this interrelated, family of sentient, feeling, living things, it has to change you.

How would you feel if you passed the local butcher shop and you saw your children dismembered in the shop window and those plastic tags that butchers stick in cuts of meat to indicate quality and price per pound, sticking up from their body parts. It’s a pretty horrible thought.

Yet, we have divorced ourselves so completely from our connection with this earth and the life on it that we treat other living beings as ‘commodity’ - as objects without consciousness, without the ability to love, without the desire to preserve their lives, and without existence as individual, sentient, living beings.

If we ever awaken to the monstrous implications of our brutal, greedy, ignorant retreat from life, from nature, and from our ‘loving parents and our loving brothers and loving sisters’, our revulsion would be the same as passing that butcher shop selling our children’s flesh.

That's why I'm vegan.