How did life arise on Earth in such a short period after its formation? Only ~600 million years had to pass before life suddenly began manifesting in the form of single-celled organisms, that seems absurdly short considering the ridiculously precise conditions necessary for life to abiotically generate, compare that to the time necessary for life to become multicellular, about 2 billion years, and that seems fucking absurd. Are scientists suggesting life will spontaneously generate in a pre-biotic environment more than twice as quickly as multi-celled organisms will develop from single-celled ones? How am I supposed to believe this?
I hope Veeky Forums is a good board to post this on, it is history. Somebody convince me that abiogenesis isn't total horseshit, at the very least life on Earth came from some other place, I refuse to believe ~600 million years is enough time for life to spontaneously begin when billions are necessary for life to even evolve to be even slightly complex.
Obviously, but how is it that in only 600 million years those "right conditions" occurred? If you actually look into how absurdly unlikely it is for life to arise from non-life, it really makes it seem ridiculous that 600 million years is enough. If the conditions are so easily met that life can begin spontaneously in a timescale so short we should be able to much more easily prove that it can do so, hell there should probably be some species still alive today that have spontaneously generated and developed alongside older species, but that isn't the case at all, everything shares a common ancestor despite spontaneous life being apparently so easy to generate naturally, even in the most remote places on Earth there is no species that is a result of an abiogenesis separate from our apparent own.
Benjamin Diaz
Atmosphere first had to change to oxygen to permit complex multicellular life forms. It took billions of years to do that. Once oxygen levels where set, evolution went quickly.
Caleb Moore
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Jose Martinez
It still seems unbelievable that land plants have been around longer than pre-biotic Earth existed, I feel like Earth should have been a dead rock for far, far longer than a mere 600 million years, especially considering the incredibly inhospitable conditions of pre-biotic Earth.
And again, why was there only one abiogenesis on Earth, why did it occur so quickly, why only during the most inhospitable period of the Earth itself? If anything, considering the much more preferable conditions of Earth today, we should be seeing abiogenesis occurring fairly often shouldn't we, or at least some other time in the past 4.6 billion years, why only once, and why so quickly after the formation of Earth?
Daniel Watson
it's entirely possible it could still happen however any life form that would come into existence through abiogenesis would have to immediately compete with the billions of life forms that went through billions of years of evolution for the same resources
that's an unwinnable battle
Brayden Cruz
Your hostility makes me not want to answer.
Camden Phillips
Furthermore we can not even prove abiogenesis in a controlled lab environment with modern technology, it is incredibly difficult to even establish the theoretical conditions necessary for abiogenesis to occur, and yet I am told to believe these conditions existed on an inhospitable barren rock in a timespan of only 600 million years?
Michael Adams
There's a theory that asteroids carried the foundations of life (water in the form of huge blocks of frozen ice and minerals) to the nascent Earth
Ayden Stewart
earth was neither inhospitable nor barren, it's seas were filled with hydrocarbons and life had hundreds of million years and an entire god damn planet to come into existence
also we have a large degree of "survivor bias"
remember abiogenesis wasn't just a possibility on earth, it was a possibility on billions of planets throughout the universe with the right conditions, so even if it was a one in a million shot of life coming into existence early, it still isn't a problem on a universal scale.
We simply don't have the technology yet to detect and visit all the failures.
Jacob Roberts
The conditions for life forming aren't around today. That's why you don't see new life forming spontaneously out of non-life. It's like asking why popcorn only pops once. The happenstance of life emerging itself made it so life couldn't happen again from non-life on this planet by transforming the atmosphere.
Oliver Sanchez
wait for artificial intelligence and it will answer
James Williams
If you subscribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics everything makes sense. All possible timelines are equally real so there doesn't need to be any mystique about the course of past events. It just happened because it was necessary for us to exist. There might not even be life elsewhere in the universe because of this. It could be a one in a universe thing.
Joshua Thomas
I believe this is far more likely than life spontaneously developing in 600 million years, some interstellar single-celled extremophiles are probably the origin of life on Earth considering the relatively short existence of our planet, and those organisms likely evolved over a much longer timespan somewhere else, somewhere with more favourable conditions than pre-biotic Earth.
Dylan Mitchell
Earth wasn't barren. 'Barren' would mean it was incapable of birthing life, not that it was lacking life to begin with. You're conflating those two things and trying to ask how a barren woman could birth a child when your criterion for calling that woman 'barren' is that she didn't already have a child before birthing that one. Which is retarded. Of course life didn't exist before it was first born. That doesn't make the Earth infertile. In fact it makes the Earth in its prime for fertility, and after birthing life that first time is when it when it became no longer able to birth life again, not before.
Kevin Sullivan
>The conditions for life forming aren't around today. They are definitely around today, what is necessary is the building blocks of RNA to be found in the environment, those building blocks are far more abundant in modern times than they were in pre-biotic Earth, this is one of the primary criticisms of the theory of abiogenesis on Earth, the environment was very sparse in terms of what is required for RNA to form spontaneously, so sparse it is nigh impossible for life to emerge from that scenario.
Carson Perez
the chances of abiogenesis are still higher than the chances of life on another planet being transplanted to ours by random chance
like several orders of magnitude larger
Owen Morris
>why did it occur so quickly, why only during the most inhospitable period of the Earth itself do you have anything to add other than your personal incredulity? it was an inhospitable period for life today, but life today didn't exist back then. these were the right conditions for life to form, not for it to flourish. also, as that user mentioned about oxygen, the earth has become less "inhospitable" due to organisms changing it. also, oxygen originally didn't make earth more hospitable in any sense. oxygen would have been deadly for early anaerobic bacteria. but life adapted to these new conditions. the earth isn't more "hospitable", life has just had billions of years to adapt to it.
Luke Phillips
you may have responded to the wrong post, mine basically agrees with everything you said
FYI we've found complex hydrocarbons in the ISM up to even basic proteins nucleic acids being generated through natural processes is not unlikely
Ian Nelson
The atmosphere is completely different today from what it was then, exactly because life wasn't around then to make the atmosphere how it is today.
Zachary Young
tldr of early evolution of life notice, that most is based on biochemical theory and experiments and very very hard to proof or falsify, since it was a really long time ago and there is very little evidence to go by.
>origin in hydrothermal vents >amino acids (stuff for proteins) and nucleotids (stuff for RNA & DNA) form due to chemical environment (both proven in labs) >nucleotids polymerize (make chains) >some nucleotid polymers become able to self replicate and catalize chemical reactions (Ribozymes, also proven in labs) >self replicating RNA becomes common and evolves into being capable of doing more reactions and synthesize first proteins (RNA world hypothesis) >RNA evolves DNA as more stable template >DNA, RNA enzymes etc encapsulates themself in simple vesicle (simple procariotic cell is there)
From pro- to eukaryotes it's a big jump because it's biochemically much more complicated (chromosomes, nukleus, mitochondria etc.) so you need a long time for evolution
Much more time consuming than coming from self replicating molecules to simple cells
Also single celled life is pretty effective, and multi cellular lifeforms are pretty complicated, so it took some time for that jump.
Furthermore we do not know how often Abiogenesis happened or even if some of the early life come to this planet from somewhere else
The prokaryotic tree of life is pretty messed up, because these life forms like to exchange DNA whenever they meet each other
Samuel Bennett
# Even if you move ebogenics away from earth you have to explain how life appeared there, survived traveling through space and then the collision with earth. It also beggs the question why said life wouldn't have found its way to Mars as well.
Jack Rivera
Isn't it accepted life was once on Mars at one point?
Aaron Hughes
>it seem ridiculous that 600 million years is enough If the right conditions are there, a few hundred years should be enough
>everything shares a common ancestor we don't know that, especially with bacteria and archea
>It still seems unbelievable that land plants have been around longer than pre-biotic Earth existed what? land plants are multi cellular life, evolving at a time when the ocean was already full of life
>we should be seeing abiogenesis occurring fairly often we wouldn't know if it's new
there are many crucial steps that can be replicated in a lab
mushroom spores can survive space microbes can survive space there is even a little bug that can survive space en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
we dont know yet if there was life on mars at one point
