Life Establishment on Urantia

58:1.1600,000,000 years ago the com­mis­sion of Life Car­ri­ers sent out from Je­ru­sem ar­rived on Uran­tia and be­gan the study of phys­i­cal con­di­tions prepara­tory to launch­ing life on world num­ber 606 of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem. This was to be our six hun­dred and sixth ex­pe­ri­ence with the ini­ti­a­tion of the Neb­a­don life pat­terns in Sa­ta­nia and our six­ti­eth op­por­tu­nity to make changes and in­sti­tute mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the ba­sic and stan­dard life de­signs of the lo­cal uni­verse.

58:1.2It should be made clear that Life Car­ri­ers can­not ini­ti­ate life un­til a sphere is ripe for the in­au­gu­ra­tion of the evo­lu­tion­ary cy­cle. Nei­ther can we pro­vide for a more rapid life de­vel­op­ment than can be sup­ported and ac­com­mo­dated by the phys­i­cal prog­ress of the planet.

58:1.3The Sa­ta­nia Life Car­ri­ers had pro­jected a sodium chlo­ride pat­tern of life; there­fore no steps could be taken to­ward plant­ing it un­til the ocean wa­ters had be­come suf­fi­ciently briny. The Uran­tia type of pro­to­plasm can func­tion only in a suit­able salt so­lu­tion. All an­ces­tral life—veg­etable and an­i­mal—evolved in a salt-so­lu­tion habi­tat. And even the more highly or­ga­nized land an­i­mals could not con­tinue to live did not this same es­sen­tial salt so­lu­tion cir­cu­late through­out their bod­ies in the blood stream which freely bathes, lit­er­ally sub­merses, ev­ery tiny liv­ing cell in this “briny deep.”

58:1.4Your prim­i­tive an­ces­tors freely cir­cu­lated about in the salty ocean; to­day, this same ocean­like salty so­lu­tion freely cir­cu­lates about in your bod­ies, bathing each in­di­vid­ual cell with a chem­i­cal liq­uid in all es­sen­tials com­pa­ra­ble to the salt wa­ter which stim­u­lated the first pro­to­plas­mic re­ac­tions of the first liv­ing cells to func­tion on the planet.

58:1.5But as this era opens, Uran­tia is in ev­ery way evolv­ing to­ward a state fa­vor­able for the sup­port of the ini­tial forms of ma­rine life. Slowly but surely phys­i­cal de­vel­op­ments on earth and in ad­ja­cent space re­gions are prepar­ing the stage for the later at­tempts to es­tab­lish such life forms as we had de­cided would be best adapted to the un­fold­ing phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment—both ter­res­trial and spa­tial.

58:1.6Sub­se­quently the Sa­ta­nia com­mis­sion of Life Car­ri­ers re­turned to Je­ru­sem, pre­fer­ring to await the fur­ther breakup of the con­ti­nen­tal land mass, which would af­ford still more in­land seas and shel­tered bays, be­fore ac­tu­ally be­gin­ning life im­plan­ta­tion.

58:1.7On a planet where life has a ma­rine ori­gin, the ideal con­di­tions for life im­plan­ta­tion are pro­vided by a large num­ber of in­land seas, by an ex­ten­sive shore line of shal­low wa­ters and shel­tered bays; and just such a dis­tri­bu­tion of the earth’s wa­ters was rapidly de­vel­op­ing. These an­cient in­land seas were sel­dom over five or six hun­dred feet deep, and sun­light can pen­e­trate ocean wa­ter for more than six hun­dred feet.

58:1.8And it was from such seashores of the mild and equable climes of a later age that prim­i­tive plant life found its way onto the land. There the high de­gree of car­bon in the at­mo­sphere af­forded the new land va­ri­eties of life op­por­tu­nity for speedy and lux­u­ri­ant growth. Though this at­mo­sphere was then ideal for plant growth, it con­tained such a high de­gree of car­bon diox­ide that no an­i­mal, much less man, could have lived on the face of the earth.