This may seem like a slightly strange question, but I’ve wondered it for some time now. And I think it makes an interesting mental exercise.
What if I could somehow go to a planet where life is just in its “primordial soup” form, with proteins, etc. just forming, but no higher-ordered life as such? And what if I prick my finger and let one drop of human blood fall into this primordial sea? Would this speed up the formation of life on this planet? Would it make it more likely human life would appear on this planet? Or for that matter, would it make it more likely life like me would appear on this planet?
As I’ve said, I just consider this a thoughtful mental exercise. But I am interested in people’s reaction to this question, if nothing else.
Thank you in advance to all who take the time to reply
It’s most likely your blood would fail to do anything remarkable at all; it might just get broken down into its component chemicals; it might be consumed by whatever primitive lifeforms (or their precursors) are present; it might poison those organisms that consumed it.
It’s just remotely possible that some of the enzymes in your blood drop could be the lucky ones to tip the balance onto a path that results in the formation of lifeforms, but there’s no particular reason to suspect that the result of billions of years of evolution following that would result in anything resembling you at all, even in approximate body chemistry terms.
It’s even more remotely possible (that is to say, less likely still) that a bacterium in your blood drop (so not technically a part of you) might find it possible to survive and become the ancestor of all future life on that planet. In this case, the long-term descendants might share some kind of biochemical similarities with life on Earth (for example, they might transmit hereditary information by means of genes composed of the same base pairs as ours).
But nothing more than pure, very unlikely coincidence is going to result in the eventual descendants ending up anything like you, in an everyday sense. They would be as similar to you as you are to, say, a mushroom.
More likely than that is that your drop of blood would spawn a race of superhumans, ones that can live off of the land, literally, by eatting mud. They would travel to earth in UFO’s and build the pyramids.
In fact, that’s exactly what DID happen. The First time. Before the First big flood.
Couldn’t most modern bacteria survive on random amino acids and protein in theoretical primordial ooze?
Without any competition, it seems like the bacteria would multiply far in excess of the few things that might destroy them, like radiation.
On the other hand, something like the enzymes in your blood (even living white blood cells) do not reproduce by themselves, so it seems to me like the quantity in a drop of blood would likely decay from random radiation before anything chemically interesting happened to it.
I think it’s more likely that some chemicals from your blood might end up becoming part of the chemistry set; yes, it’s most likely (as I said) that it would all just be broken down before anything happened - but the same is true of the abiogenetic chemical reactions that would be happening; special, rather lucky, circumstances would be required to kickstart life anyway - if the blood drop found itself in the right place at the right time, some of its complex chemicals could become part of the big picture.
-bacteria that infect the human body aren’t typically very good at surviving without it; my evaluation that they would be less likely part of the picture was weighted by the fact that they may be poorly represented in a single drop of blood, or absent altogether.
