There has been a very interesting series of documentaries celebrating the many years David Attenborough has spent exploring the Natural World.
In the time that he has been seen as a fixture in our understanding of Nature, much has changed in the perceptions we have of the Natural World.
In one of the programs, he talked about the work of a young student in Chicago, Stanley Miller, who in 1953 spent six months looking at a practical experiment that was designed to discover if the conditions supposed to have existed during the early years of the primitive Earth might have generated Life.
Suffice to say he created in the test tube many of the organic compounds considered necessary as the building blocks for Life itself.
Laser analysis in 1995 of his test results established that even more complex organic chemicals had been created in the circumstances of his experiment, and in more recent times, it has been shown that deep under the sea there are places where living organisms survive around the heat of volcanic vents which generate entire ecosystems, deep beneath the sea, that challenge our preconceptions of the way in which life can be established.
these experiments in no way provide any sense of certainty over the creation of life on Earth, and do not lessen the sense of wonder at the variety and complexity of it.
There are so many questions to answer about how fragile the conditions within which the Earth finds itself to have found a suitable crucible in which to fashion life, that a sense of wonder is still undiminished.
That the sun is clearly essential for life seems to be equally balanced with the fact that the solar winds might have stripped our atmosphere, if it was not for the magnetic fields generated because of the core.
We have much to be grateful for, and much still to discover. And no doubt much that must remain unknown to us.
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