Hacker News Reader

Comment by xqcgrek2 | Hacker News Reader

If I had a time machine, the Cambrian and the period immediately preceding it would be the first place I'd go.

It's so incredibly interesting that whatever happened caused the first proper multicellular life to arise after 3-3.5 billion years of just single celled life.

View on HN

Maybe you did and brought multicellular life back with you.

I think that Picard actually witnessed the event.

ST:TNG (Series Finale) S7E26/27

https://youtu.be/YLyqTtrhUJE

Thank you! It seems that he witnessed the birth of life on Earth, not the birth of multi-cellular life.

Will do that. They haven't yet, presumably. At least from our perspective, anyway.

They will and did. That's how life started, millions of years ago.

> Will do that. They haven't yet, presumably. At least from our perspective, anyway.

Well, from the perspective of their subjective experience.

From our perspective, if we are already seeing the effects...

You might like this short story: http://mrsfacca.weebly.com/uploads/7/6/1/2/7612927/opabinia_...

"Hoyle and Wickramasinghe viewed the process of evolution in a manner at variance with the standard Darwinian model. They speculated that genetic material in the form of incoming pathogens from the cosmos provided the mechanism for driving the evolutionary engine"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_from_Space

That is kind of hilarious in retrospect, but sad that Wickramasinghe is still clinging to it.

Make sure you calibrate your time machine offsets properly, as a day during the Cambrian Explosion is about two hours shorter than today.

Please be very careful where you step, lest you trigger an extreme version of the grandfather paradox ;)

Make sure you bring an oxygen tank.

previous stages of any exponential process look very slow from the late stages of it. The process of producing and complicating the single cell life [from nothing] in these 3-3.5B have tremendous complexity on its own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com