We can never know how life really started on earth. Even if we succeed in producing bacteria or bugs that crawl out from swirling chemicals in a test tube, we will never know if that is how life actually started on our planet, merely that such things are possible, and perhaps more likely than we once thought. But science is not about exceptions, it's about rules; and the rules that govern the emergence of life on our own planet should apply throughout the universe. The quest for the origin of life is not an attempt to reconstruct what happened at 6.30 a.m. on Thursday morning in the year 3,851 million BC, but for the general rules that must govern the emergence of any life, anywhere in the universe, and especially on our planet, the only example we know. While the story we'll trace is almost certainly not correct in every particular, it is, I think, broadly plausible. I want to show that the origin of life is not the great mystery it is sometimes made out to be, but that life emerges, perhaps almost inevitably, from the turning of our globe. ~ Page 10