Exactly how life came about on Earth is hotly debated, but currently unknown. A team of Google researchers, however, have published a paper (yet-to-be-peer-reviewed) that may help to shed some light on this topic.
The paper provides information about how the team took some very basic ‘building blocks’ of code, and allowed it to to process billions of times, simulating billions of ‘generations’ of digital evolution.
Eventually, they found that the code had began to self-replicate, which is one of the requirements for life.
Susan Stepney from the University of York, UK (not a part of the study), commented on the findings:
“Managing to evolve self-replicating programs from random starting points is a great achievement. This is definitely a great step towards understanding potential routes to the origin of life, here in a medium quite removed from the standard ‘wetware’ of biology.”
The idea of the experiment was to attempt to run a simulation on the ‘primordial soup’ that existed in the early days of the Earth. The hope is to answer whether, given enough time, life can emerge from non-life.
Ben Laurie, a software engineer at Google and co-author of the study, explained what they found:
“I don’t think anything magic happened. Physics occurred, and it just occurred a lot over a very long time, and it gave rise to some very complicated things.”
This impressive experiment was done on a laptop using an obscure programming language that is known for being very minimalistic.
They entered as few instructions as possible, basically jut allowing the code to execute and overwrite themselves and the code around them.
Random data (meant to stand in for molecules) were entered into the digital environment, and then the program was allowed to run.
It is important to note that there was nothing in the program that directed the code to try to achieve self-replication or any other specific end result.
Since computers are able to process extremely quickly, the program was able to process through billions of generations in a relatively short period of time.
So, while finding self-replicating code after billions of years is not a true example of life, it may be the first step. It may take billions, or even more, iterations of the program to ‘evolve’ into something even more complex (if it ever would).
Researchers have not said whether they would repeat or continue the experiment on more powerful computers that could process far faster than a simple laptop, but it seems likely that they will.
For now, however, we are reminded of the famous line from Jurassic Park: “Life, uh, finds a way.”
That has never been more true than it is today.
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