Water is both the source of life and an obstacle to the formation of life. Why do we say that?

Water is the source of life. I believe no one will raise any objection to this, because all known life forms on Earth, including humans, cannot live without water.

Why can't life be separated from water? Whether it is a simple life form or a complex life form, in order to ensure its own survival, it must carry out a series of corresponding life activities. The essence of these life activities is actually chemical reactions, and all these chemical reactions necessary for maintaining life require the participation of water. Therefore, it can be seen that water is well-deserved to be called the "source of life." In this case, why is water said to be an obstacle to the formation of life?

Life did not exist from the beginning. There was a process for life on Earth to emerge from nothing, and this process began with the formation of protein.

Protein is a macromolecule, which is composed of a series of amino acids. What is the force that binds the amino acids together? It is chemical bonds, which are formed through condensation reactions. What is a condensation reaction? Simply put, a condensation reaction is a reaction in which multiple organic molecules interact with each other and are combined into a macromolecule by covalent bonds, accompanied by the loss of water molecules. If you find it a little obscure, it doesn't matter. You just need to notice that this process involves the loss of water molecules.

Protein is the basis for the formation of life, and the necessary condition for the formation of protein is "water loss".

In fact, not only proteins, but also many life substances need to go through the step of "dehydration" in their formation, such as DNA, complex sugars, etc. Dehydration is not difficult, but if you are in an environment surrounded by water, it becomes very difficult, just like a person who wants to stay dry when immersed in water. Now you understand why water is an obstacle to the formation of life. Before the formation of life on Earth, the Earth was a vast ocean, because the early Earth did not have the distinction between continental crust and oceanic crust. The continental crust was gradually formed in the later geological evolution process.

Since the entire surface is covered by water, how did the formation of early life substances achieve "loss of water"?

In fact, this question has always been a mystery. Scientists have made many guesses about this mystery until they finally locked their sights on water droplets. Of course, the water droplets mentioned here are not the water droplets we talk about in daily life. To be precise, they should be called "microdroplets". Microdroplets, as the name suggests, are extremely small water droplets with a diameter of about one millionth of a meter. This tiny water droplet has a typical feature, that is, it is very small in size, but the surface area corresponding to the volume is very large. This feature makes it a good solution to the problem of "water loss" in the early stages of life formation.

There is a large space at the junction of the droplets and the air surrounding the droplets. This space is called the "air-water interface". It has a unique chemical environment, and in this unique environment, chemical reactions will be accelerated.

Through repeated experiments, scientists have discovered that on the surface of droplets, the rate of chemical reactions can be increased by 100 to a million times, which means that the formation of amino acids and proteins can be completed quickly on the surface of droplets. To further verify this inference, the researchers conducted another experiment in which they sprayed the amino acids dissolved in the droplets into a mass spectrometer, and the two amino acids successfully combined together.

Later, the researchers added more amino acids to the experiment and used the same method to simulate the collision in the early stages of life, resulting in short peptide chains of up to 6 amino acids.

In other words, early life on Earth was formed in droplets and then nurtured in the ocean. Were there really so many droplets in the early Earth environment? There is no need to worry about it. Droplets are widely present. There are a large number of such micro droplets in the waves on the water surface and in the aerosols.

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