Выпуск: 4 , Том: 84 , Год издания: 2014

Science knows many examples when ideas that appeared naive and interesting only to historians were read anew and became topical in light of previously unknown facts. More than 2500 years ago, the Ancient Greek philosopher Thales, in search of arche, the element underlying the existence of all substances, generalized his knowledge about the surrounding world and concluded that "water stood under all things." Today we know that matter has a highly complicated composition and water is a compound that appeared at a late stage of the development of the universe, but the thesis of Thales acquires a new meaning in considering the evolution of matter on our planet. A.I. Oparin wrote about the important role of water in the rise of organic matter, but the author of the article published below goes further and shows that data of geology, geochemistry, geophysics, and other related disciplines make it possible to conclude that water is the key element of the matter-complicating mechanism, and, hence, studying the properties of water and water environments deepens our understanding of global evolution and, most importantly, favors the construction of an evolutionary model in which different stages do not oppose one another rigidly but are described as the components, although fundamentally different, of the continuous and consistent process of emergence of complex compounds in water solutions of various compositions.