The origin of life on Earth

I'd love to hear what our members think about this topic (if they care).

Some people theorize that life began in a planet-wide ocean, organizing from complex proteins, etc.

Others think life may have stowed a ride on a space rock, and that the common ancestor of all living things on Earth was born somewhere else in the universe.

I'd love to hear what others think and if there's a theory I've missed, please let me know.

Don't forget Creationism -- as believed in by a minority of, but still far too many, fundamentalist-minded low-level Christians, Islamists and Jews -- who believe that God created the Earth in a lazy week somewhete between 2050 and 4600 years B.C. (depending on which fundi' church you attend..).

"Intelligent Design" is merely the repackaging the Creationist mythology to help sell their nonsense to a new generation..

Or Spontaneous Generation, also known by other names -- where its proponents suggested that some "life" can simply create itself from dead material -- as seen with fly and beetle maggots appearing on corpses.. (Obviously those uneducated peasants who supported that nonsense wanted to keep their distance from said corpses, choosing to not observe the insects laying the eggs..).

The 'Primordial Soup' hypothesis -- the production of basic amino acids through random chemical reactions, aided by plentiful lightning strikes and a high-methane atmosphere (relatively speaking..) is a necessary precursor to the idea of life evolving in the oceans -- after all, those proteins had to be created from amino acids, before evolving into the earliest viruses, bacteria and protozoa.

Or the Alien engineering theory.

We need to know more about 'what is life', but I'm inclined to believe, like the rest of the universe, it's a matter of chance and necessity.