Microbial Life on Qukoha

The first four billion years of Qukoha's earliest history were the Kevozoic era when the rocks formed and the most primitive life appeared, and the Emfanisizoic era during which sponges, sea worms, and other forms of sea life appeared and more rocks and mountains formed.


The most elemental unit of everything in the universe, both living and non-living, is the atom. When two or more atoms bond together, they create simple molecules, i.e., CO2(carbon dioxide), O2 (oxygen), and H2O (water). Simple molecules, then, link themselves into a chain molecule and fit inside a cell and are arranged in complex architectural structures called molecular structures. Cellular membranes are formed by combining two layers of regimented phospholipid molecules.



Life on Qukoha began in water. Most of the essential molecules of life dissolve, create chemical reactions, and are transported easily in water. The water molecule's overall electric charge is neutral, but the oxygen tends to pull negatively charted electrons toward it, leaving the hydrogen slightly positively charged relative to the more negative oxygen. Since most of life's important molecules are also electrically charged, they slip easily through water's charges, becoming soluble and accessible for chemical reactions.




When the first cells appeared on Qukoha, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. The oxygen began to be generated when certain photo synthetic microorganisms appeared and utilized the sunlight to extract the hydrogen they needed for self-construction from water molecules, leaving molecular oxygen as a by-product. Oxygen first entered the atmosphere in noticeable quantities some two billion years ago, progressively rising to reach a stable level about 1.5 billion years ago.

In the beginning stages of the emergence of life on Qukoha, there appeared prokaryotes - small and single-celled microbes- that lacked nuclei, but had remarkable ability to evolve and adapt. They developed into a wide variety of species and were in every habitat of the entire Qukoha. Then through the next one billion years, the majority of prokaryotes evolved to eukaryotes which were much more complex and about 10,000 times larger in volume than prokaryotes.



In a prokaryote, a single chromosome represented the entire genetic make-up of the microbe. In a eukaryote, most DNA is contained in more highly structured chromosomes that are grouped within a central enclosure, the nucleus. Eukaryotes have in their cytoplasm up to several thousand specialized structures (organelles), such as: perosixomes (serve assorted metabolic functions), mitochondria (the power factories of cells), and plastids (the sites of photosynthesis in algae and plant cells).

 


This evolution of prokaryotic state to phagocytes to eukaryotic cells is believed to have taken place over a billion years and was at first as means of feeding itself: many modern eukaryote cells - white blood cells, for example - entrap prokaryotes. Sometimes the invaders/victims escape destruction and kill their captors. Occasionally, both captor and victim survive in a state of mutual tolerance that can later turn into mutual assistance and, eventually, dependency - hence the endosymbionic beings -phagocytes - were created: mitochondria, plastids, and peroxisomes may have been a host cell's captives that came to provide invaluable functions eventually for the host. For example, it has been observed that peroxisomes rescued the host cells from oxygen toxicity as the atmosphere began to fill with oxygen.

 


Scientists believe that endosymbionts played a critical role in the birth of eukaryotes and other multi-celled plants and animals, such as sponges, sea worms, and other forms of sea life in the next billion years. Ancestors of all higher forms of the living world in Qukoha originated from microscopic, wriggling, squirming creatures (similar to bacteria)- prokaryotes; which in turn were made up of smaller nonliving bits.

 


Bacteria invented all of life's essential chemical systems and transformed Qukoha's atmosphere, developed a way to get energy from the sun, devised the first bioelectrical systems, invented sex and locomotion, worked out the genetic machinery, and learned how to merge and organize into new and higher collectives.

 


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