The story of life begins with a much larger cooperative process: the self generation of our Solar System. Pieced together from thousands of examples across the Galaxy, astronomers have constructed a “movie” that begins in a swirling large molecular cloud of gas and dust, several light years across.
Something, or some process possibly similar to a tornado, starts to pull together a future star. It’s gravity pulls more and more dust and gas into a spinning disc, eventually igniting the nuclear fire in its central star, and settling into orbiting planets. This is a self- organizing system that appears to have occurred billions of times in our Galaxy alone. At least 80% of stars are now thought to have planets around them. Some planetary systems have been shown to move in great harmony with themselves. Our solar system may represent a general process, probably occurring all over the universe.
Self-organizing continues as the planets settle into a resonant, self-influencing dance that has many harmonies, yet never quite repeats over billions of years. Within this dance, Earth itself has been settling and separating out into the dense iron/nickel of it’s core, through progressively lighter layers of rock, out through the gases of the atmosphere, to the charged particles in our magnetic fields.
Mid-weight carbon, present in the first large molecular cloud, settled out along with most of the water at the boundary between the rock below and the atmosphere above. This environment, in the midst of the larger self- organizing of the planet itself, has been a necessary stable ground for the beginning of life. The cooperative self- organization of the solar system seems to be a universal pattern that is a necessary stage in the development of life.