A swarm in my soup

‘Bubbling’, ‘fermenting’, ‘revolution’, ‘the masses’ and ‘the dawn of a new age’. We usually use these terms in times of major upheavals and breakthroughs – when everything that we once knew is coming to an end, while the new world, though not yet fully defined, makes its entrance onto the stage of history. Since around the middle of the last century, scientists have believed that amino acids – the so-called building blocks of life – could have originated in what is known as the primordial soup. In that chemical environment all that was needed was a sufficient amount of energy to make them, thus kick-starting the development of life on Earth. What the conditions were really like then is difficult to say – we are talking around about 4 bln years ago. However, experiments have been done that go some way towards confirming this hypothesis. And for the next millions and billions of years life gradually eme