We’ve had the idea that life began in the oceans since the 1920s, when it was first put forward. This was cemented in our minds in the 1950s by the classic Miller-Urey experiment from which scientists hypothesized that the ocean-atmospheric cycle of early earth could have been the perfect conditions to instigate life … but there were many unanswered questions.

Since then, biogenesis researchers—those are the folks who study how life began—have been kind of obsessed with finding that key catalyst that would have brought chemical components together for the first time. And research from the past several years has shown that in some situations, that special sauce could have been UV radiation. And while some teams HAVE been able to recreate the building blocks of life with UV light, no one has yet been able to successfully perform these transformations in experiments that replicate seawater. Meaning that our whole ‘life crawls onto land from the oceans’ idea….could be wrong?

And here’s another problem: while water is a definite requirement for life on earth …the chemical properties of straight up H2O actually break down proteins. Including things that are made of protein—nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, the genetic material that hold the blueprint for all living things. These days, living cells tightly control their water balance to protect their insides from water degradation, but…how are proteins supposed to have formed IN a substance that actively attacks and degrades them? Scientists now call this ‘the water paradox’.