Origins of life

What is life? Although the word life seems to have an obvious meaning, it leads to different ideas, making it necessary for us to define the very object to which we refer in this text. For psychologists, it brings to mind the psychic life; for sociologists, the social life; for theologians, the spiritual life; for the common people, the pleasures or the sore spots of existence. This is part of our strongly anthropocentric view of the world. For a (relatively small) part of the people, it brings to mind images of forests, birds and other animals. Even that image is partial, since the great majority of the living organisms are invisible. The microbes constitute the greatest part of living organisms, most of which (80%) living below the Earth’s surface, adding up to a mass equal to that of plants. However, microbes still do not occupy the due dimension in our imaginary, despite more than a century of use of the microscope and of frequent news in the media involving the powerful action of microbes, sometimes causing diseases and other times curing them, being a part of the ecosystem or affecting food production. That framework is due to the fact that life is still a recent them