The biggest question that remains fixed in my brain ever since I was a kid is that – why do we survive on water and not on any other fluid? There are some millions of animal and plant species that survive mainly on water. Apart from this; what’s more interesting is that water forms only 90% of our body weight as well as the major component of any living cell of the body. So the obvious question that comes to our mind is that – What makes water soooooo… Special ?

Same is the case with the oxygen. A major number of organisms on the earth live by breathing oxygen in – They are classified scientifically as the aerobic organisms; whereas there are even a few bacterial species for which oxygen is fatal. They breathe in carbon dioxide and other gases known as the anaerobic organisms. So what we can presume out of this is that most of the organisms survive on oxygen and water, whereas a few rare species survive on the other gases and fluids.

Now there are many theories explaining origin of life on the earth, out of which the most widely accepted theory is the theory of random creation and theory of evolution.

What this theory suggests is that initially, during the formation of our planet, the hydrogen must have combined with the oxygen and due to suitable weather conditions; the reaction was boosted leading to the formation of water on early stages of earth. According to this theory, initially, earth was a massive rd hot planet and then several million years later; it started receding away from the sun. Luckily and coincidentally, we reached an optimal distance that made us, what we are today. This optimal distance favoured the water to remain in the liquid state.

Once the water was formed, due to intense heat of the sun and atmospheric pressure, there was a random combination of the different atoms of H, O, C, N, S, etc. Out of all these chemical reactions, there was one chemical reaction that turned out to be divine- a chemical reaction that is the father, the creator of you, me and every single creature that ever existed on this planet. All the modern infrastructure, technology, innovation and every single thing on this planet won’t have existed if only this reaction would not have occurred.

That reaction was the formation of amino acids. These amino acids of various types, linked with each other in long chains leading to the formation of a variety of proteins. The development of these complex chemicals continued for hundreds of years leading to the formation of the first living cell on the planet. It’s a fact that apart from the characteristics like consuming food, excretion of the waste products, growing and dying; the very special feature of any living organism is the property of reproduction – An ability to continue our species and to increase the population. This single divine property is what led that first single formed cell reach to this stage, where it made you and me.

This single cell formed kept on dividing and joining, forming higher and complex organisms. This cycle of division and improvement continued from generations to generations for millions of years, leading to the present day – Homo sapiens.

Here it is worth mentioning of the Urey and Miller’s experiment. Urey and Miller created the weather conditions that might be present during the formation of earth, millions of years ago, artificially in their  laboratories and looked for the chemicals that might form out of it. To everyone’s surprise, they found some 20 different types of amino acids formed under those similar conditions. This cleared a few of our questions regarding the origin of life on earth.

During this period of division, some of the organisms settled in the different habitats and the different atmospheric conditions and that led to the formation of several million different species that we see around us today. This change in the habitat of the organisms led to some miraculous organisms ranging from the slow moving sloth to the giant T-rex and variety of other weird bacterial species. One of my favorite organism that you would have hardly heard of is the Tardigrade – considered as the toughest organism on the earth and almost impossible to kill. This little eight legged micro insects can withstand less than 1 Kelvin temperature (-272° C) upto 450 Kelvin (150° C). These tough guys can even survived the meteor that flushed off the dinosaurs. Be it ionizing radiation to the most lethal toxins, they can survive anything. They can live without food and water for almost lifetime…

A wise man once said- “you may be worth a millions, but you are still inferior than a tardigrade..”

(Hearing this might bring an Awwww….. to your face…!!)

Apart from all that, during the period of origin of primary life forms, the content of nitrogen was almost twice than that of the oxygen in the air. But since the temperature of the earth (20-45°C) favored oxygen for the life reactions, oxygen became the chief respiratory gas. Had the temperature of the earth been 200-300°C, there is a possibility that the major organisms that developed might use nitrogen for breathing and not oxygen.

However we can never get through the mother nature’s decision, since there are many exceptions and loopholes – there is a bacteria called Rizobium, that has some NIF gene, that survives only on nitrogen and not on oxygen. There are even some bacteria for which oxygen turns out to be fatal.  So Vast is the mother Nature and so has to be our vision towards it.

Stephen Hawking in his book-“Brief History of Time” stated that there could be some life forms that are just an electron sized and their lifespan would be just in femtoseconds and that are habituated in the core of the stars where the temperature remains some million kelvins.

During the early 2000’s, when the Elon Musk was working for developing the SpaceX; he once stated that his soul aim for this company is to colonize mars in spite of the tough weather conditions. We can figure out some sort of organisms that can survive on mars, which may form some extremely new variety of species, years later.

 Now leaving the Musk’s Statement aside, we can definitely conlude that it was the atmospheric conditions that led majority of organisms to feed on oxygen and water. If initially the earthly conditions had been different, the entire story would have been completely different.

So our philosophers can never say that there is no life on other planets as there is no oxygen or water. There could be some weirdest of species that might exist on the planet; that even the science fictionaries and the makers of Doremon or the Star Trek cannot imagine.

Einstein once asked a question- How many choices did god have in constructing the universe? – If the No Boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose the initial conditions. However, he would of course still have the freedom to govern the laws that the universe obeyed.

Soooo, the Ultimate Question is – Why is that we and the universe exist? If we find an answer to that it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – For then, we would know the mind of god?

-          By Sneh Sonaiya