What if the story of life on Earth isn't what you think it is?

[NeoGreen]

1. Not unlike something I have pondered...

...(lightly). The hypothesis known as Life Before Earth.

Life Before Earth

Alexei A. Sharov, Ph.D.
Staff Scientist, Laboratory of Genetics
National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH)

Richard Gordon, Ph.D.
Theoretical Biologist, Embryogenesis Center
Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory

Abstract
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide. The genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially due to several positive feedback factors: (1) gene cooperation, (2) duplication of genes with their subsequent specialization (e.g., via expanding differentiation trees in multicellular organisms), and (3) emergence of novel functional niches associated with existing genes. Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago. Adjustments for potential hyperexponential effects would push the projected origin of life even further back in time, close to the origin of our galaxy and the universe itself, 13.75 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: (1) life took a long time (ca. 5 billion years) to reach the complexity of bacteria; (2) the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; (3) there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; (4) Earth was seeded by panspermia; (5) experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and (6) the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe. Evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of human functional complexity has reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we discuss the issue of the predicted "technological singularity" and give a biosemiotics perspective on the increase of life’s complexity.

as illustrated in the following chart:


It is one of those things that makes me go, hmmm...