Billions-of-years Quote by R.W. van Bemmelen

“Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000)… It is big…

— Fred Hoyle

“the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life.” In this view, “life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that…

— Kevin Kelly

I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up…

— George Wald

The fact that this chain of life existed [at volcanic vents on the seafloor] in the black cold of the deep sea and was…

— Robert Ballard

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

— Stephen Jay Gould

We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a…

— George Wald

“The actual structure of the life we know is deeply and pervasively anchored in the particularities of the periodic table. If one wishes to…

— Eric Smith

The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials…

— John Polkinghorne

“Astrobiology simply presumes that a planet in the Goldilocks zone containing liquid water will somehow produce life. This leads to the “follow-the-water” strategy in…

— Cris Putnam

“Life, its processes and structures, occur in its solution. Every living thing, then, is simply a different inflection of water; a deviation of a…

— Alok Jha

“600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the…

— Carl Sagan