For many, many years it has been an accepted fact that the Earth was formed several billion years ago, as a molten ball circling a fairly new star, (which we now call the Sun), and after a rather long period of time the ball solidified, cooled and gradually formed rocks and large masses of water, and an atmosphere established itself here.

Then some sort of magic occurred – many say it was perhaps a flash of lightning hitting a puddle containing just the right soup of chemicals, so that they sprang into primitive life, and from that accident of electricity and chemicals, all the life we now have on earth sprang, from that first moment, and evolution took over the rest of the story.

Others, just as learned as the purveyors of the first theory, but travelling a slightly different path, are convinced it was God who did it all, creating the Earth and then putting people on it, with everything else, all fully formed and complete, just as he had made them.

There are even those who are quite convinced that none of that exists at all. We are all creations of our own existence, living in some sort of ether, dreaming up everything we see happening around us, though for what purpose I have no idea.

General opinion seems to be that, in most cases, when a new star is born and collects planets around itself, that is more or less the end of the story – unless the planet is fortunate, (?), enough to get that vital flash of lightning, or some God comes along and creates all the wonders possible in such places.

And why not? These are perfectly acceptable answers to an old and imponderable question and both methods do fill the gap pretty well.

But it occurred to me, only this morning, that there could be another, rather different reason for all the life we have here on Earth, and if we are to believe the astronomers and scientists, there is now pretty good evidence that there is life on millions of other planets throughout the Universe as well.

So what if life itself is the vital element?

What if every planet that gets ‘made’, throughout the Universe, has the ‘life-force’ contained within its structure, a basic, perhaps necessary particle, (or whatever form it might take), waiting everywhere, for a particular planet to reach that certain stage of its development when the life-force can spring into action.

There could be millions of these particles in every planet and each one could result in a different life form!

For instance, here on Earth, accepted theory is that a single individual in Africa became the whole human race in all its variety. But what if these ‘life-forces’ had, in the early days of Earth worked their magic on many cells, all over the globe, and evolution had then taken those tiny beginnings and run with them, until eventually arriving at the human form, which took many shapes and sizes, having first come from so many primal starters?

This would account, very easily for the multitude of humans there are, including Caucasian, Oriental, Negro, Arabic and Aboriginal, much more logical than the idea that the one first human being then branched off into all the races we know today.

And of course, the same could apply to the ‘life-forces’ that took the path of becoming all the cats, bovines, fish and other animals, while still others could be the ‘creators’ of plants, flowers, shrubs, seaweeds and trees, in fact, all living things from the spirogyra to the blue whale.

I’m sure an expert would be able to shoot me down within seconds, pointing out all the reasons why this idea could not be so, but it’s been great fun, thinking about all the possibilities this ‘life-force’ idea offers as a way of explaining all the diversity we see around us.

© 2023 Brian Lee 
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