Why did life appear so early?

>The Earth was formed 4.54 Gya; the earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 Gya. Fossil micro-organisms appear to have lived within hydrothermal vent precipitates dated 3.77 to 4.28 Gya from Quebec, soon after ocean formation 4.4 Gya during the Hadean.
If life spontaneously appears as soon as conditions are able to sustain it, shouldn't there be a lot more visible life in outer space than we see?

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

Homeless People Are Sexy Shirt $21.68

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    space is too big and we can't even go to the moon anymore or for first time or whatever

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >alien from older universe forgets to clean its boot after it stepped on a dropped space nacho
    >not its problem
    >explores primordial earth a bit
    >leaves
    >earth contaminated with space nacho bacteria
    >...
    >life

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    the more we observe the universe the more apparent it becomes that the answer fermi paradox is and the most hardcore version of the rare earth hypothesis.

    alien life is still guaranteed to exist. but not guaranteed to exist in all galaxies, much less more than once in the same one.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >If life spontaneously appears as soon as conditions are able to sustain it, shouldn't there be a lot more visible life in outer space than we see?

    no.
    there are billions of billions of billions of planets capable of sustaining life.
    we just ended up on one of those that developed life early

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I think life is a natural consequence of the very universes chemistry. Its like almost inevitable.

    I also agree on ppl that states that complex life is another, very huge, step.

    Id also add that our complex life detection range is very narrow, granted we cant even properly probe the other edge of our own galaxy.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >we cant even properly probe the other edge of our own galaxy.
      At least we can probe Uranus.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >as soon as conditions are able to sustain it
    that's the kicker

    99.99999999999....% of space is inhospitable to life 99.999999999....% of the time.

    also if space was your neighborhood and human history was your lifetime we have explored less than one atom of it for less than a billionth of a second.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Maybe if we can detect massive bacterial mats, but the consensus right now is that while it took maybe 500 or so million years for life to appear, it took 3-4 BILLION years for complex multicellular organisms to appear.
    It's just seems far more likely for tiny strands of chemicals to become self organizing and "reproducing", therefore "competing" with other "more effective" strands to create more of itselves
    Than for later cell based life to begin cooperating to such an extent that they basically become one reproductive organism.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      You really think that abiogenesis is less of an obstacle to evolution than the step from single celled to multicellular life? That seems really surprising to me.

      >as soon as conditions are able to sustain it
      that's the kicker

      99.99999999999....% of space is inhospitable to life 99.999999999....% of the time.

      also if space was your neighborhood and human history was your lifetime we have explored less than one atom of it for less than a billionth of a second.

      we can see pretty far into space and there's no signs whatsoever of any alien civilizations. in this galaxy or any galaxy we can see.
      you think there's really no other planets out there that can support intelligent life?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        The universe is 13.8 billion years old. The upper bound of age of a planet is 9 billion years old, approximately.
        The earth is 4.5 billion years old.

        The earliest land plants cropped up 470 million years ago and land animals around the same time period and the first capacity for both listening for and screaming out to extraterrestrial life is so recent that you can read about it in archived news papers. The time scales are fricking enormous. We can't get detailed enough images of other planets to definitively say "there's life there", we have fricking shadows passing in front of stars and rough guesses at compositions of those objects. There could very well be alien dinosaurs or ocean monsters or hunter gatherers out there on a planet we've already detected and we wouldn't even know, and that's not mentioning that we can only see so far out and that what we do see is outdated by virtue of distance and travel time.
        We are a myopic eye opening for a bit longer than a blink on the galactic stage. Give it time.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >We are a myopic eye opening for a bit longer than a blink on the galactic stage. Give it time.
          But any life that reaches the intelligent stage is going to start strip mining the surrounding solar system and eventually the whole galaxy (probably using robots). That should have happened already, unless we really are the first ones to make it to this stage.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            We didn't even reach that stage yet

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              yeah but in terms of geological timescales we're on the verge of reaching it, unless we don't extinct ourselves in the process. we have all the tech to do it today.
              any alien civ that can build computers and nuclear energy plants is only a few centuries away from starting to colonize the space around it

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        We only have one example to look at, maybe Earth was a special case in terms of the development of life, but the fact that we can say we know that life itself developed extremely early while multicellular life took far longer I think says something about how difficult complex life is.
        Like, the Earth was only first habitable to life 200-300 million years after it formed, after it cooled down from formation and later planetary impact, and liquid water appeared. It took only 200-300 million years after that for physical proof of life to appear.
        But for multicellular life, the Cambrian explosion happened 3.5 billion years later, seemingly out of nowhere. Like some outrageously unlikely event in the development of life was finally reached.
        Some forms of multicellular life even existed only 2 billion years or so after life appeared, but they didn't form complex organisms for at least another 1.5 billion years.

        I think if we ever find alien life, at least 90% of life bearing planets will only have single celled life.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >You really think that abiogenesis is less of an obstacle to evolution than the step from single celled to multicellular life? That seems really surprising to me.
        Evolving multicellular life isn't particularly hard once the conditions to support it are there.
        The problem is that to get those conditions, the planet needs to be terraformed first.
        Primitive life relying on thermal vents and shit is easy. But it's nowhere near enough energy to sustain complex life.
        To do that, life had to evolve photosynthesis, thereby increasing the O2 content in the oceans, and almost causing its total extinction.
        Photosynthesis also reduced the CO2 content in the atmosphere at a time when the sun was incredibly faint. Bam! Ice age. Another mass extinction, biological activity and especially photosynthesis drastically reduced, O2 enrichment of the atmosphere slows down to a crawl.
        And after several billion years of that, O2 content was FINALLY enough to support more complex life. and multicellularity happened.
        Evolution's the easy part.
        Terraforming's the hard one.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Aliens

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      what the heck do they want??
      why don't they reproduce using all the free untouched resources that are lying around everywhere in space?
      is Darwin btfo by the hecking Ayyys?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        They want other humanoids to frick so they did targeted extinctions to generate us

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *