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Be still. Feel yourself breathing—in and out.
Feel your heart beating rhythmically—dub ah dub ah dub ah dub.
Imagine your blood moving along through your arteries, small cells, each with a nucleus, each containing the map that makes them part of you. Each cell bumping and twisting. Moving along. Endless transfer of energy and nutrients as your blood cells deliver oxygen to all parts of your body.
And in that endless motion is the story of our beginnings. The story of how we came from an ancient, primordial soup.
Once upon a time five billion years ago, our solar system was new by universe standards—and energy was flying everywhere.
The Earth was a swirling ball of hot lava—hotter than you can even imagine. It was made mostly of hydrogen, with some helium and some oxygen. The seas glowed and swirled and ancient volcanoes spewed forth lava from the center of the Earth.
The Earth was bombarded day after day with comets and meteors, making things even hotter. Meteorites brought with them particles from space, dust from the explosions of stars. Carbon. Nitrogen. And Water, H₂O. And in that heat, at that high temperature, the water turned to steam and gathered around our planet.
Over time, the meteor crashes slowed down and the earth began to cool. It was a great day when earth cooled enough for all that steam to become water. And it rained. And it rained. And it rained. For millions of years it rained. The oceans of the earth filled to their brim.
When the oceans were filled, was it calm and still then? Not on your life! Not on our collective lives! The oceans swirled, and the molecules left behind by meteors and comets began to bump together. There was a most spectacular lighting storm—one that lasted millions of years! Energy from other parts of the universe transferred to the Earth’s oceans.
The molecules began to clump and hook themselves together. In twos and threes, and then in whole colonies. Chains of carbon. The first RNA. And these carbon-chain colonies ate hydrogen, at first from the bubbles that came from the volcanoes on the ocean’s floor. And when they had eaten all the free hydrogen there was, they figured out how to split apart the water molecules and eat the hydrogen from them. The carbon chains began to move on their own. They were alive. They were living bacteria.
Life had barely begun on our planet when it created a pollution problem for itself. When the living bacteria split apart the H₂O to eat hydrogen, they released oxygen into the atmosphere. The leftover oxygen was poison for the first life on earth. Bacteria began to die off. Rapidly.
About 2,400 million years ago, it looked like life on Earth was finished. But the moving and bumping, the whirling and swirling, the thunder and lightning—it all continued. Two bacteria merged together- one was swallowed by another and became its center, the nucleus, the protector of the RNA. A eukaryote was formed.
But still there was that problem with the oxygen-filled atmosphere.
Until some oxygen-eating bacteria—the mitochondria—came to the rescue. They began eating all the poison oxygen and turning it into energy. And in the middle of the bumping and moving, whirling and swirling, thunder and lightning, primordial soup- something happened that saved life on earth.
The eukaryotes and the mitochondria joined forces. The mitochondria moved into the eukaryotes and began turning oxygen into energy, becoming the engines for what became cells, with what we now call DNA.
And in the midst of the whirling and swirling, the bumping and jostling, the cells joined together. Seven hundred million years ago, the clumps became jellyfish and worms and an ancient creature called a trilobite, which had a kind of eye. Cells began to take on special jobs, so that some did the eating and some did the garbage disposal, and some did the looking out for danger, and some did the work of moving around.
The primordial soup teemed with life. And that life would continue to bump and jostle, and create ever more complicated clumps and colonies and beings. And it has never been still. Even unto this day, when the whirling and swirling, clumping and sharing, energy eating and energy using restless motion happens inside all of us. We are born of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, of stardust brought by meteors, of water raining down, of the joining of bacteria, and eukaryotes and mitochondria.
We are born of motion and energy and chaos and danger and cooperation. This is our inheritance. This is our beginning. And it is with us still, even in our own bodies.