Life began in the sea. David Attenborough, Life on Earth V: Conquest of the Waters, BBC 1979
Our planet – the Earth – is as far as we know unique in the universe – it contains life. David Attenborough, The Living Planet I: A Portrait of the Earth: The Building of the Earth, BBC 1984
But in the waters of the world conditions were much more stable. Life had begun there some 2,000 million years earlier still. David Attenborough, Life in the Undergrowth I, BBC 2005
The ocean is by no means uniform. Differences in depth, temperature, sunlight and currents pose particular challenges. One and a half miles down these hydro-thermal vents spew out super-heated water at 450° Centigrade from cracks in the Earth’s crust. Despite the enormous pressure, total darkness and scoldingly high temperatures the ancestors of all life may have evolved from a place just like this. David Attenborough, Life e8: Creatures of the Deep, BBC 2009
The discovery of life that exists without drawing any of its energy from the sun shows us once again how complex and surprising the underground world can be. David Attenborough, Planet Earth e4: Caves
The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there’s a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I’ve been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species. David Attenborough, State of the Planet, BBC 2006
I just want to go back and show where this whole thing started. When I was a boy that was regarded as totally unknown. There was no evidence of how life started. And today there is evidence. David Attenborough
Using the latest technology it’s possible to bring those first animals to life in over half a billion years. David Attenborough’s First Life 1/2, BBC 2010
The history of life can be thought of as a many-branched tree with all species alive today related to common ancestors down near the base. The five kingdoms of life – the main branches – were established early on … That for me is the most fascinating question of all – how and when did they first appear? ibid.
Microscopic single cells – they first appeared about three and a half billion years ago when the Earth was a very different place. ibid.
Deep in the oceans life had begun. The latest theory is that chemicals spewing from underwater volcanic vents solidified and created towers like these, and this produced the conditions needed for the first cells to form. ibid.
Just before complex life appeared the world was in the grip of the biggest ice age in its entire history. ibid.
Snowball Earth ... It’s likely those conditions lasted for millions of years ... Life was nearly annihilated before it had barely begun. ibid.
We owe our existence to ice-dwelling extremophiles. ibid.
And it was this increase in oxygen that was the key to the rise of the animal kingdom. ibid.
The arrival of sexual reproduction speeded evolution. ibid.
There was about to be an explosion of life that would be the foundation for complex animals. ibid.
The group – the Arthropods – were the great pioneers. They were the first big predators. They had eyes, legs and hard external skeletons. ... They were the first to crawl out of water to conquer the land and air. David Attenborough’s First Life 2/2
The Cambrian ... 542 million years ago. During the next ten to twenty million years animals increased in numbers, in diversity, in size, than ever before. ibid.
The Burgess Shales where a rich seem of fossils documents the Cambrian explosion in astonishing detail. ibid.
Moroccan trilobites are big business these days ... Trilobites were the first animals to see clearly. ibid.
Giant millipede – about four and a half feet long. ibid.
The golden age of the giant Arthropods was not to last. ibid.
Insects alone make up at least 80% of all animal species. ibid.
Life originated in the ocean. After an immense period of time some creatures managed to crawl up on to the land. Those animals may seem to us to be very remote, strange, even fantastic. But all of us alive today owe our very existence to them. ibid.
A hundred and fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s revolutionary book, modern genetics has confirmed its fundamental truth – all life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of Life. David Attenborough, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, BBC 2009
Darwin’s great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world. We now understand why there are so many different species. Why they are distributed the way they are around the world. And why their bodies and our bodies are shaped in the way that they are. Because we understand that bacteria evolve, we can devise methods of dealing with the diseases they cause. And because we can disentangle the complex relationships between animals and plants in the natural community, we can foresee some of the consequences when we start to interfere with those communities. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world. We do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its law and processes as are all other animals on Earth, to which indeed we are related. ibid.
We knew next to nothing about that great mystery of all – the origin of life. Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild II: Understanding The Natural World, BBC 2012
Stanley Miller had demonstrated that the first steps leading on the path to Life would have happened spontaneously. ibid.
Its [submersible] searchlights revealed a whole community of hitherto unknown animals … More of these astonishing eco-systems have now been discovered elsewhere. ibid.
Darwin had explained how different species evolved but he also proposed that all life was inter-related having come from a common origin. ibid.
Maybe it wasn’t the frogs that moved; maybe it was the continents. ibid.
1984: The Living Planet; 1957: Zoo Quest for the Paradise Birds; 1996: Attenborough in Paradise. ibid.
1976: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. ibid.
Some animals sometimes behave in an unselfish way. ibid.
The first meerkat film we made turned these animals into stars. ibid.
A whole new branch of science – molecular genetics. ibid.
So if we didn’t have the cyanobacteria we wouldn’t be around. We owe our heritage to the scum of the Earth. Robert Roy Britt, live science online
The survival of some of these building blocks – can they be delivered to the Earth that would help seed a planet so the conditions of life can begin to exist? Peter H Schultz, AMES high velocity research lab
All of us came from the same place. We have so many things in common with bacteria there is just no doubt about it. Ken Nealson, geobiologist
Now it has been suggested by other people that maybe life on Earth was brought here by a visitor from another planet. While this possibility is remote it certainly can’t be excluded on the basis of the results we have found. Dr James Lawless, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, 1973
Imagine if our planet’s eventful history was compressed into the twenty-four hours of a single day. At midnight the infant Earth was born ... At sixteen minutes past midnight a cataclysmic collision created our moon ... Then just before one o’clock in the morning the scene was set for ... the origin of life ... It took more than seven hours for all the iron to be removed from the oceans till one p.m. in the afternoon ... Over the next eight hours the microbes raised the level of oxygen ... It took only the last three hours of our twenty-four day for all the other life-forms on our planet to evolve. The first multicellular life emerged at six minutes past nine in the evening. The first fish at twenty-two minutes past nine ... By ten to eleven in the evening dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The first primates appeared at twenty to midnight. And with just thirty seconds to go, the first humans made their appearance. Tiny microbes had ruled the planet for over three billion years – two-thirds of the history of the Earth. The Day the Earth Was Born, Channel 4 2002
More than seventy varieties of amino acids have been found inside meteorites, and eight of them are the fundamental constituents of proteins found in living cells. ibid.