Life on Earth may have begun 300M years earlier than previously thought
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
So at what point does the lag time between accretion and first evidence of life become too short for "native" abiogenesis to be plausible, pointing toward a transfer scenario instead?
A much better source for what you are talking about would be e.g. finding tardigrades or similar in the asteroid belt. That would show that life was part of the mix that went into the forming of the planets.
Let's say the probability of new life is roughly constant (and a relatively low probability). It should roughly follow a Poisson distribution -- in other words, using current knowledge, and assuming (1) life would be created noticeably differently given similar circumstances and (2) it didn't (molecule chirality indicates both of these, for instance) AND (3) the events are independent, which you need for the distribution -- then it'd be pretty weird for something following a Poisson distribution where:
Earth Exists: Time 0. We have physical things from the time period: Time 2 Event in the distribution: Life: Time 4 Then absolutely no new instances until time 45 (unit here is 100MM years)
This is all by means of formalizing your argument, which is largely correct. But it's important to note that it assumes that the events are independent, which I strongly, strongly suspect they are not. Life takes resources and uses them up, and will expand until it meets carrying capacity. So first-past-the-post-wins seems like a much better guess as to the relationship between origins-of-life.
That's the kind of train of thought that keeps me up at night.
That's pretty depressing IMO.
Age of the universe: ~13.8 billion years
Life on earth: ~4.1 billion years
That's a decent chunk, not the blink of an eye.
If the age of the Universe is 13.8 billion years, I wonder, what was happening 13.9 billion years ago? What about 13.8^2 = 190 billion years ago and even before that ?
Kind of mind bending, but time seems to be infinite (at least to us) so at that scale, the life of Earth is really a blink of an eye or less.
What we 'know' is given to us by the mathematical models which we invented to describe the observed reality.
Currently, we have different models to describe reality based on the scale of observation.... Which is interesting because as you zoom into the microcosmos there's a point were the laws of physics magically 'switch' from relativity to quantum mechanics.
As a programmer who is not a physicist, I can smell a hack right there. Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion that maybe our model of reality is not entirely correct.
So if I were to bet on weather time existed before our model's mathematical moment zero or that our mathematical model is imprecise, I would definitely choose the infinity of time.
Our mathematical model is for us or future generations to adjust to whatever we discover in the future.
There is no hack and there is no switch. QM and relativity are just abstractions at different scales over the same underlying principles. We do have a problem of stiching them together, but that's just us not having figured out the relevant math yet. But you're not free to notice a problem in one part of the model and then discard the parts that match the reality pretty well. Any updated, better, unified model invented will not differ in its predictions from QM at scales and precision levels where QM is applicable, because our present models are based on empirical observation. Transition from Newtonian to relativistic models didn't make apples fall up.
"Time" is also something we define and is valid only within that definition. For now, "time" starts with the universe, so the question of what was before is meaningless and will be, until we find a plausible way to extend the concept beyond the beginning of the universe.
The map and territory analogy is a really good thing. The territory doesn't change in any way when you make a better map.
We don't have freedom to just change it. We first have to find a possible valid way to change it and nobody has. Also nobody's found a way to fuel a car with water, fly on magic carpets or travel back in time to meet our grandparents. It might turn out to be impossible. Would you bet on those things happening one day? As another commenter said, your intuition is no match for nature - it's based on human's very narrow experience of the world, our inability to see how limited the concepts we can imagine are and our arbitrary biases for the ideas we like at the expense of ones we don't understand.
Let me stop you right there...
So, do you have to propose anything better?
Mere intuition "but time seems infinite" is not that.
If I did, would anyone listen to it here ?
The point being that, throughout history humans always had a dominant theory about the origin of Universe and it was considered the truth at the time.
The bing bang theory is one such theory which is currently accepted as 'truth' by the scientific majority, but it is not the last and not the only theory explaining the origins of the Universe.
The man himself said it:
"We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature." - Stephen Hawking
Maybe not here, but people would read a good paper on Arxiv.
But he also points out that the development of eukaryotes, which are a class apart from prokaryotes (1000x the size and probably 1000x as complex) is even more of a mystery/fluke. And, again, looks to have happened just once in 4 billion.
Some series of unlikely events.
I guess certain molecules essential to life are right or left-handed, and if life started several times independently, we should (statistically) see both types of handedness. So then the question is: why didn't life start multiple times independently?
The main difference between particles/antiparticles and chirality, though, is life tends to extinguish other life in its competition for replication. Antiparticles just tend to annihilate 1:1.