yesterday, NOVA featured an awesome program on the origins of life. this has become a hot topic because the christian fanatics in the white house are marketing "intelligent design" as a complement to /replacement for the theory of evolution. i could not watch the full show because i had some stuff to do. anyway, a couple of scientists were saying that life begins when the right amount of certain chemicals under conducive conditions is present. once the desired conditiosn are achieved, the bio-chemical-physical reactions takes care of the rest. the scientisits pretty much said that life exists when these chemical reactions exist. (on a different note, consciousness, some claim is simply the presence of huge amounts of neural/electrical activity). well, if this is indeed the case, then creating life is not as difficult as it may seem. given that earth has been around for 4B yrs and life on earth has existed for 2.5B yrs, and that beings like us, who can compose symphonies, construct engineering masterpieces, and question our very existence have evolved from nothing but a primordial soup of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, it does seem like in the universe that's been around for 20B (??) yrs, somthing must have happened elsewhere too... in the movie "Contact" (based on carl sagan's work), the astrophysicist played by jodie foster says, "well the universe is certainly a huge place" (or something to that effect) when a kid asks her if there are other forms on life.