Ubbo-Sathla

In another of his stories ("Ubbo-Sathla"), Clark Ashton Smith describes a critterthing that is the source of life on Earth. It dwelt at the dawn of our planet’s history, and he named it "Ubbo-Sathla." Here is how he described it:

There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla
reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it
sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that
were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to
apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing.

In a previous post, I mentioned to you another of Smith’s oozy life-begetting masses, Abhoth. While Smith seemed to have a thing for oozy masses in his fiction, one thing that distinguishes these two is that Abhoth is not identified as the origin of terrestrial life, while Ubbo-Sathla is. Abhoth just sits down in his cave fissioning off weird, misshapen creatures.

But what if Ubbo-Sathla and Abhoth were the same thing?

FREAKY IDEA #3

Thomas Gold posits the existence of a "deep, hot biosphere" down in the Earth that out-masses the biosphere living on top of the Earth.

How did the deep, hot biosphere get down there? Did microbes seep down from the surface biosphere to colonize the Earth’s innards?

No according to Gold.

From his WIRED interview (link forthcoming):

And you believe that the oily depths where you found magnetite represent the environment where life on Earth began?

Yes. You can only suppose the origin of life in circumstances where there is no direct access to the source of at least one of the components that you require. If you have the common story of the warm pond on the surface, then all of the things that are needed will be accessible to whatever microbes there are. So they will multiply exponentially up to the limit of the food supply. That means that in a flash the whole thing is done and they are all dead. There has to be a process of metering out at least one of the components so it’s impossible to eat up everything at once. The hydrocarbons from the mantle provide that metered supply. If life developed down below, it could later crawl up to the surface and invent photosynthesis.

Now for the third shoe to drop.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin