Lightning sparked all of life on Earth, say Harvard scientists: ‘One of the great unanswered questions’

The scientific community has been electrified by this new theory.

The inception of life on Earth may have been the result of chemical reactions sparked by lightning strikes, a new study from Harvard suggests .

“The origin of life is one of the great unanswered questions facing chemistry,” said senior author George M. Whitesides.

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Specifically, what remains in question is how billions of years ago the building of life — the nucleic acids that make up our DNA, proteins and metabolites — “emerged spontaneously,” the professor of chemical biology added.

The new research piggybacks off a hypothesis that water, electrolytes, and common gasses merged to create Earth’s first biomolecules. Previous theories have posited that an asteroid could have crashed onto our planet and deposited the needed pieces to life’s puzzle — but the lightning theory provides a much cleaner and more plausible hypothesis. Lighting strikes could also be a source of carbon and nitrogen gases which allowed the biomolecular structures to survive.

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To test this, the team created an experiment with the fourth state of matter, plasma, to explore how lighting impacted its chemical composition. It was done under the barren conditions of lifeless, prehistoric Earth.

Simulated “cloud to ground” lightning strikes yielded high-energy sparks capable of transforming carbon dioxide and nitrogen “into highly reactive compounds.” Specifically, carbon dioxide could be reduced to carbon monoxide and formic acid and nitrogen could morph into nitrate, nitrite, and ammonium ions.

And, more than diving back to the past, this new revelation also holds potential for future potential discoveries of life off of Earth .

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“Lightning has been observed on Jupiter and Saturn; plasmas and plasma-induced chemistry can exist beyond our solar system,” lead author Haihui Joy Jiang said.

“Moving forward, our setup is useful for mimicking environmental conditions of different planets, as well as exploring reaction pathways triggered by lightning and its analogs.”

It can also become a driver in natural technology.

“We are also interested in this research from an energy-efficiency and environmentally friendly perspective on chemical production,” added Jiang.

“We are studying plasma as a tool to develop new methods of making chemicals and to drive green chemical processes, such as producing fertilizer used today.”

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