PBS Eons has a new video.  This one is about the very early history of the Earth, a period called the Hadean.  How did the building blocks of life form?  Harold Miller did some experiments in the 1950s attempting to recreate the conditions.  The impacts of a large asteroid might have provided the perfect condition for the formation of amino acids.

We may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.