Showing the math for Earth’s first — and sudden — spark of life

Isolating the first spark of life on Earth is a matter of biology, geology, and chemistry — but it’s also an amazing math problem. At least, that’s how Varun Varanasi ’24 viewed it when he was a Yale undergraduate.

The question, in a nutshell, is this: How did the primordial soup of interacting molecules on the Earth’s surface billions of years ago transform itself from complete chaos to an organized system of self-sustaining, reproducing chemicals? Did this occur gradually over millions of years, or was it abrupt?

Researchers have been mulling over this question for a century. Inspired by a class he took as a Yale undergraduate, which was taught by Yale geophysicist Jun Korenaga, Varanasi decided it was his turn.

That inspiration would become Varanasi’s senior thesis, which is now the basis for a new study in the journal Physical Review E. (It is co-authored by Korenaga, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.) more