Science’s Attempt at the Oldest Question: Where Do We Come From

The sky as our first mystery

There’s a reason children ask “where did I come from?” long before they’re old enough to grasp DNA or galaxies. The question feels basic, but also limitless. You start small your parents, your grandparents but then the horizon keeps pulling back. Before long you’re staring at the night sky, wondering not only where you came from, but where all this the Moon, the Milky Way, the faint smudge of a galaxy just visible with the naked eye originated.

What’s striking is how recently we realized those smudges weren’t just parts of our own Milky Way but entire galaxies in their own right. That discovery didn’t happen until the 1920s, which means our grandparents lived in a world where the universe seemed far smaller. Einstein had already reshaped physics with general relativity, and only then did astronomers begin to grasp that the cosmos stretched far beyond the stars in our backyard.

Myths before microscopes

For most of human history, origin stories belonged to mythmakers. Every culture produced one: gods carving mountains with thunderbolts, spirits breathing life into rivers, ancestors sculpted from clay or born from trees. These weren’t just stories; they were attempts to make sense of existence in a world without telescopes or genetic sequencing.

Science changed that not overnight, but steadily. Over the past two centuries, biology, chemistry, and physics have pieced together something more substantial. It’s still not complete (and may never be), but the mosaic we’ve assembled already reshapes how we think of ourselves. Instead of singular, miraculous origins, we see continuity: a living chain stretching back billions of years.

Your parents, their parents, and so on

Let’s bring it down to something concrete. You are the child of two parents who contributed half of your genetic material each. That code doesn’t just set your eye color or blood type; it carries instructions for enzymes, proteins, immune responses the nuts and bolts of staying alive. Your parents inherited their code from theirs, and so on. At some point, that chain links to humans who no longer exist, species like Homo erectus or the Neanderthals, both of whom walked the earth with brains not so different from ours.

And if you keep pressing rewind, you eventually leave behind anything recognizably human. Our lineage threads through ancient primates, mammals scurrying under dinosaurs’ feet, and further still to tiny marine creatures. Keep going, and the line blurs into single celled organisms floating in a world without oxygen.

Evolution’s strange lottery

How did that happen? Not through design in the sense myths imagined, but through a blend of randomness and ruthless selection. Mutations occur, some helpful, most irrelevant, a few harmful. The environment then acts as the referee. Creatures that cope survive long enough to reproduce, and those that don’t fade away. That process, over billions of years, produced everything from hummingbirds to blue whales.

But here’s the catch: evolution isn’t a straight ladder with humans at the top. It’s more like a chaotic tree, full of branches that end abruptly. If you rewound the tape and ran it again, you wouldn’t get the same cast of characters. Maybe no giraffes, maybe no humans. As Darwin suggested, time and variation do the heavy lifting, not destiny.

Tracing life’s first spark

The oldest firm evidence for life dates back about 3.8 billion years, found in ancient sedimentary rocks that survived Earth’s violent early history. Some scientists push the timeline even further, citing isotopic hints in rocks 4.4 billion years old, which suggests the planet may have supported life almost as soon as it cooled.

That part still feels unresolved. Did life emerge in shallow ponds? Around hydrothermal vents at the ocean floor? Did it ride in from comets or meteorites? None of these ideas are fully proven, but they’re not fantasy either. Each comes with evidence, and each could be overturned tomorrow by new findings. It’s a reminder that even when science provides answers, those answers remain provisional always open to refinement.

Cosmic origins of our ingredients

Of course, the story doesn’t end on Earth. The atoms in your body carbon, oxygen, iron were forged in stars that lived and died long before the Sun existed. Some of those stars exploded, scattering their contents into the galaxy, eventually condensing into the dust and gas that became our Solar System. In a way, the question “where do we come from?” doesn’t stop at life or even the planet. It reaches out to supernovae, to black holes recycling matter, to the Big Bang itself.

And here’s where humility creeps in. We can map a lot of this story with surprising precision, but beyond a certain point, the questions become more philosophical again. What caused the Big Bang? Was it the beginning of everything, or just one chapter in a cycle? Science edges closer to these mysteries, but at the frontier, speculation and imagination take over once more echoing, oddly, the myths we thought we’d left behind.

Why the question still matters

So, where do we come from? The short version: from an unbroken line of living things stretching nearly four billion years, shaped by evolution, powered by chemistry, and built from stardust. It’s a scientific answer, but not a cold one. If anything, it adds weight to the wonder we feel looking up at the night sky.

The gaps still matter. We don’t fully know how the first spark of life ignited. We don’t know if we’re alone in the universe or if life is bubbling up in countless places. And maybe that’s the point: the search itself keeps us asking, keeps us curious.

The myths gave us meaning. Science gives us mechanisms. Somewhere between the two, we find ourselves still marveling at the same question only now with better telescopes, better microscopes, and a deeper sense of just how vast the story really is.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: BigThink