Published online: 14 November 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061113-9

Was life on Earth inevitable?
Life may be the ultimate in planetary stress relief, a new theory claims.
Philip Ball

The appearance of life on Earth seems to face so many obstacles - sourcing
the right ingredients, for example, and arranging them into living things
(while being bombarded by meteorites) - that scientists often feel forced to
regard it as almost miraculous. Now two US researchers suggest that, on the
contrary, it may have been inevitable.

They argue that life was the necessary consequence of available energy built
up by geological processes on the early Earth. Life sprang from this
environment, they say, in the same way that lightning relieves the
accumulation of electrical charge in thunderclouds.

In other words, say biologist Harold Morowitz of George Mason University in
Fairfax, Virginia, and physicist Eric Smith of New Mexico's Santa Fe
Institute, the geological environment "forced life into existence".