Yahoo Answers is shutting down on 4 May 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

? asked in Science & MathematicsAstronomy & Space · 11 months ago

How did microbes appear on earth?

The first organisms on earth were microbes. But, I can’t figure out how did these microbes come about? Only explanation I can come up with is that they could have came through meteors. Although, this is just coming straight from my head with no scientific evidence or knowledge to prove this. 

11 Answers

Relevance
  • 11 months ago
    Favourite answer

    Like many questions in science, the correct answer is "we don't know".

    What we do know for sure is that the Earth is about four and a half billion years old. The earliest fossils of lifeforms we have are microbes from about three and a half billion years ago. Therefore microbes were present on Earth when the Earth was only a billion years old. There is no evidence to show how these microbes arose. Anything you read on the subject is speculation.

    Another interesting fact is that the Earth was populated entirely by microbes for three billion years. It is only in the last half a billion years, called the Cambrian period, that complex plants and animals developed.

  • Tom
    Lv 7
    11 months ago

    So small you cant see them at ALL----until we got Microscopes.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    11 months ago

    The first living things were not organisms at all.  They were self-catalyzing, self-replicating molecules, perhaps a ribonucleic acid.   These RNA molecules evolved over millions of years into the first cellular organisms.

  • Anonymous
    11 months ago

    Microbes first appear on earth about 4 billion years ago.

    when primitive bacteria appeared in sulfurous oceans under poisonous skies

  • Anonymous
    11 months ago

    Microbes appear just as they always have. 

    All dressed up, and nowhere to go.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    11 months ago

    What does this have to do with astronomy and space?

  • ?
    Lv 7
    11 months ago

    It is called Evolution.    Life on Earth Started in the Oceans.

  • 11 months ago

    There are several competing scientific theories of biogenesis.  There are reasons for and against all of them.

  • 11 months ago

    So how did the meteor microbes come about? Whatever answer you come up for meteors, would work even better for microbes first appearing on Earth. Unless you can somehow show that super-cold, dry space is better than a warm, wet Earth.

  • KennyB
    Lv 7
    11 months ago

    Another explanation is that they formed in the chemical soup (somtimes called the primordial soup) of the early CO2-rich and O2 depleted earth.  Literally, chemistry run amok.

Still have questions? Get answers by asking now.