Many human cultures have creation stories that attempt to answer the question of where man came from. Our ancestors have been grappling with this question for a long time. However, the question remains: can we answer this question with our current knowledge?
The question of where the first life came from is one of the seven Welträtsel described by Emil du Bois-Reymond in 1880. Werner Ahrendt substantiates his assumption that the first forms of life originated on the seabed.
All living organisms on Earth use the same genetic code to translate genetic information into proteins. Werner Ahrendt presents a hypothesis as to how this code may have evolved over the course of natural history.
How what we call consciousness arises in the brain is undoubtedly one of the world's great unsolved mysteries. Emil du Bois-Reymond posed this question in his famous lecture, "The Seven Mysteries of the World," given at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1880: "Where does conscious sensation come from in the unconscious nerves?"
Human beings are capable of greater intellectual achievements than any other living creature on earth. How did this happen? The answer may shed some dark light on our ancestors.
During his time at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) is said to have discussed with some colleagues on their way to the staff canteen why mankind has not yet seen any evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations. Fermi assumed that the emergence of life and its development into intelligent species was not a singular event on mother Earth, but had already happened several times in the universe and even in our galaxy. But why then have we not yet found any traces of these alien civilisations, such as alien spaceships or radio signals from inhabited planets?
