Paul Davies Quotes

No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

Thus it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life could easily be produced from inanimate material.

We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. It may have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire galaxy. On the other hand, it may have been almost inevitable, given the right environment.

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.

The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.

In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.

The RNA World referred to an hypothetical stage in the origin of life on Earth.

I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.

Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life - plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.

From a personal perspective, I am disappointed that we have yet to really achieve a full understanding of the origins of life on Earth. What was the spark that, billions of years ago, kickstarted the process of evolution that has brought us life as we know it today? I hope that we will get some answers to that in my lifetime.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that life's complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.

Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.

The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed.

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.

The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets.

I can't remember if it was in the third grade in school, I was being told that two amoeba happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago, and I was an accident. I was the result. I wasn't real smart, but I said, 'I don't like the sound of that.'

Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.

There's already a world of evidence that life on Earth is unique and intelligently crafted.

The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.