On The Origin Of Life

[sigurdV]

The Panspermia idea is a lot of conjecture anyway. Very lean on evidence. There is no requirement of a star nearby per se, just the material sufficient to make stuff. So when I was saying at the same galactic radius as the sun, I mean in the proximity of where might have formed. Thus the Panspermic cloud could have preceded the firing of the sun and thus be around before 6.5 BYrs. I am not aware of any guesstimate on the age of our galaxy if even known. So the bracket of time for the origin of any such cloud - is since 12.7 BYrs or so (maybe sometime after) till life arose on Earth.

 

 

I don't know you can conclude that "We are alone"...! You could speculate with some authority that maybe we might not be Interesting...?!?

That is nobody that might be out there really give a hoot of our existence if known. That we are known is likely as we have been broadcasting our existence since the wireless and TV.

 

Maybe this area of space is a "galactic nature preserve" and "galactic citizens" would suffer penalties if found communicating with the natives. Until you have an event, you can't prove or disprove a non-event in either way.

 

maddog

Hmmm ... Maybe I wasnt clear enough? ... My opinion is that our universe is PACKED with life... That ALL stellar clouds produce life independently of each other! The reason for this being so, is that life is part of the sexual apparatus of universes!

 

This means mankind is like a sperm competing with other sperms in order to fertilize an egg... We know what happens with sperms coming second, dont we? ...

 

I miss the old naive picture of the universe as a peaceful place where WE was all that had happened , and was going to happen ... Alas ... Darwins pond turns out to be a nightmare!

[sigurdV]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381Life Before Earth

 

Alexei A. Sharov, Richard Gordon

(Submitted on 28 Mar 2013)

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: gene cooperation, duplication of genes with their subsequent specialization, and 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 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; 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; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and 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 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 complexity.

Comments: 26 pages, 3 figures

Subjects: General Physics (physics.gen-ph)

Cite as: arXiv:1304.3381 [physics.gen-ph]

(or arXiv:1304.3381v1 [physics.gen-ph] for this version)

0

[ErlyRisa]

I got a couple - you willing to pay me for a trip around the world - Darwin got to travel!

[Eclogite]

There is so much in this thread that is, to my mind, wrong that I don't know where to begin. So here are some thoughts. You may wish to respond to one or more of them.

 

1. I dislike the way people use the Drake equation as if it was a means to calculate the number of extant civilisations in the galaxy. It was an agenda, for a meeting at Greenbak Observatory, to explore what might control the number of extant civilisations in the galaxy. While we have refined and actually quantified some of the terms in the equation since its introduction, some steps remain seriously obscure.

 

Consequently, to extrapolate from a sample size of one is not only risky, it is plain silly, unless you are doing it as a game. If you seriously intend that the result means something, then you are mistaken.

 

2. Someone said bacteria were simple! Nonsense. The difference in complexity between prokaryotes and eukaryotes is small compared with that between prokaryotes and non-life.

 

3. While liquid water may be rare in molecular clouds, surface area is enormous and many surfaces can promote chemical actions efficiently, even at low temperatures.

 

4. Between the end of the Heavy Bombardment period and the first appearance of life we have barely 100 million years. Until we can come up with a plausible, complete series of steps by which life might form in such a time period we are just guessing.