Baba on the first life form

"The ocean was very warm and still, and due to the presence of gas and air in the water, it became rusty. Algae was formed from this rust, then gradually seaweed. The algae used to sink below from above. When it reached the bottom of the ocean, it became seaweed. From the original algae came seaweed, and from seaweed, vegetation." (LM 1871)

When I first read this I was really disappointed. It seemed like Baba didn't know ANYTHING. I must not have been the only one to have been embarrassed because when Lord Meher first appeared on-line the editor had added the word "(oxidized)" beside the word "rusty." This made no sense as water is 1/3 oxygen and can't oxidize - or so I thought.

But more recent developments have cast some surprising light on things Baba said, both about the rust and the algae that sank in the ocean. Scientists have not been able to replicate life in a vacuum, but with Baba's hints they may soon be able to.

Lake Nyos, Africa turns "rusty" 1986

In August 1986, a lake in Cameroon called Lake Nyos suffered an Earthquake with very strange results. CO2 was released from under the lake, killing 1700 people nearby while they slept. This upsurge of CO2 caused unnatural amounts of iron oxide to be released into the water. As this iron came to the surface it made contact with the air and oxidized, turning the lake a brownish red. In the words of some it was said that the effect could be crudely described as the lake becoming "rusty." In the History Channel documentary The Exodus Decoded, Simcha Jacobovici posited that this same effect might have explained the Nile turning red and the cloud of death described in Exodus.

This is so interesting because Baba said, "...due to the presence of gas and air in the water, it became rusty." It was due to the release of CO2 gas from beneath the surface of the water that this "rusting" occurred at Lake Nyos.

(10:34:48) V.O. NARRATION (off camera): In 1984, at Lake Monoun and in 1986 at Lake Nyos, both in Cameroon, the sweet, clear lake waters suddenly turned blood red. The mystery was solved when Professor George Kling explained the phenomenon in terms of an underground gas leak.

PROFESSOR GEORGE KLING: What was happening was that the bottom waters contain very high concentrations of iron, dissolved iron, and when that was mixed up to the surface when the gas was released, it contacted oxygen and it formed an iron hydroxide. Essentially rust, the same thing that happens on cars. And that rust was what caused the reddish, brownish color at the surface of the lake.

Now I want to talk about the algae that Baba said formed from this rust at the surface and sank to the sea floor. From this Baba says plant life evolved. This is so interesting. Realize that scientists do NOT KNOW how life formed on the Earth, so all bets are still on.

Let's look at what Baba said.

"From the original algae came seaweed, and from seaweed, vegetation."

Baba says the first dense form was stone, then metal, then algae. As I said I'm not a scientist, but the form of algae depicted below called Stromatolite, found on the coast of Australia, is 3.5 billion years old. It was first misinterpreted as a rock form, until it was realized that it was alive.

Stromatolite, found on the coast of Australia

Stromatolite is unique among living things because it takes its nutrition directly from the sun's radiation. It does not need any other life forms to feed upon. This would be a requirement of the first life form. As it broke down it would begin to form the kind of biosphere necessary for other more complex lifeforms that evolved from it to feed upon.

Ancient stromatolites

These are excavated ancient stromatolites found around Marble Bar in Western Australia dated at 3.45 billion years. So far, the oldest dated Earth rocks are 3.96 billion years.

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Update Oct. 5, '22

According to the noted biochemist Leslie Orgel, who pioneered research on the origins of life, the earliest onset of life on our planet occurred around 3.8 billion years ago. Since oxygen was projected to be absent from the earth at that time, metabolism in living organisms would have been anaerobic, involving the use of minerals present in the ocean to generate energy. However, around 2.7 billion years ago, a peculiar group of microbes, known as cyanobacteria, evolved. Phylogenetic analyses based on 16S and 23s rRNA, genome reconstructions and fossil evidence have been used to understand the evolutionary characteristics of these early living organisms. These microbes possessed the remarkable ability to perform photosynthesis, (i.e., they could generate energy from sunlight). Cyanobacteria possessed the machinery to utilize water as a fuel source by oxidizing it. More significantly, the by-product of photosynthesis happened to be oxygen.

Returning to Baba's words, Baba referred to this first life form as algae. The common name for cyanobacteria is blue green algae. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cyanobacteria&oldid=1111066329