This second of four forums focuses on how our planet’s geological activity set the stage for the rise of life. Get up close and personal in our town hall setting with the experts whose discoveries are linking our planet’s most-fundamental processes to the origin of life. There are aspects of our planet’s geology that have not been observed on other worlds and it turns out that they could be crucial for creating the conditions that allowed life to thrive here. For example, the deep Earth activity that drives plate tectonics could have introduced the cycles of chemistry that laid the groundwork for life’s origin.