Betül Kaçar

roughly three, probably less than three billion years ago.

And that's the only way that nature invented to fix the nitrogen in the atmosphere for the subsequent use.

I cannot think of it, no.

It's essential to life as we know.

You and I are having this conversation because life found a way to fix nitrogen.

Well, we think of this as the cocktail, you may hear.

What's in the cocktail?

It's the schnapps, right?

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur.

So there are five elements that life relies on.

We don't quite know whether that's the only out of many options that life necessarily needs to operate on, but that's just how it happened on our own planet.

And there are many abiotic ways to fix nitrogen.

Like lightning, right?

Lightning can accumulate ammonia.

Humans found a way about 100 years ago, I think around World War I, the Haber-Bosch process that we can abiotically convert nitrogen into ammonia.

Actually, 50% of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from the human conversion of nitrogen to ammonia.

It's the fertilizer that we use, urea, comes from that process.

It's in our food.

So we found a way to fix our own nitrogen for ourselves.

Oh, absolutely.