Geologist Juan Manuel García Ruiz still speaks with amazement about how he and his colleagues have created “a proto-world” in their laboratory, located just 1,500 meters from La Concha beach in the Spanish city of San Sebastián. It may sound monumental, and it is, but what they have is a small, transparent container, just three liters in size, where they’ve placed a mixture of water, methane, nitrogen, and ammonia, adding electric discharges to simulate the harsh conditions of the primitive Eart...