These vents provide the most compelling scientific vision of Eden: high concentrations of organic materials, held in what chemists would call the far-from-equilibrium conditions of proton waterfalls, mean that complex chemistry emerges quite naturally. And, so the theory goes, this is the reason why all life on Earth today shares the same predisposition for proton gradients. It always did! Our common ancestor was not a cell, nor even some kind of simpler free-living thing, but a set of chemical reactions occurring inside a small chamber of rock, rich in organics and lined with naturally
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