(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

(Inside Science) — Experts believe the building blocks of life first bumped into each other about 3.5 billion years ago. This serendipitous collision somehow helped form the first rudimentary cell — and the first life on Earth.

At least, that’s been the predominant theory. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Washington is challenging this idea in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Ac