What was the reason for urey miller experiment & how did it contribute 2 the hypothesis of the origin of life?

Question

What was the reason for urey miller experiment & how did it contribute 2 the hypothesis of the origin of life?

Answer 1

The question was, can naturally proceeding chemical processes lead to the formation of life?

The answer was that the basic chemical constituents of life can be created by natural chemical processes.  

Still leaves open the question of how these various chemicals actually combine and become self-replicating and somehow develop into consciousness, but it got us started.  You should note that there are flaws in the original experiment, that the conditions it presumed to replicate are probably not a good representation of what really existed.  Nevertheless, the experiment did show that the chemical constituents of life could form relatively easily in the course of natural processes or phenomenae.

Answer 2

It made a self contained sterile system with water (H2O), Methane (CH4), Ammonia (NH3) and Hydrogen (H2).  it heated the water to evaporation then ran electric current (to simulate early earth being so hot water would be atmospheric steam and electric was to replicate the lightning) and then let cool down to condense water.

At the end of one week of continuous operation Miller and Urey observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids, including 2-3 of the 22 that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed. Nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) themselves were not formed. As observed in all consequent experiments, both left-handed (L) and right-handed (D) optical isomers were created in a racemic mixture.

So basically it showed that organic compounds, amino acids, and DNA could have come about chemically in an atmosphere such as what we think early Earth would have been like

and those products were the precursors to life according to Abiogenesis