Surviving the Late Heavy Bombardment:
We find that the “last universal common ancestor” – a hypothetical very early single cell from which all life on Earth descended – existed prior to the “late heavy bombardment”. This was a period of intense meteor bombardment sustained by our planet about 3.9 billion years ago. This is significantly earlier than the currently accepted oldest fossil evidence would suggest (estimating 3.5-3.8 billion years ago).
The oldest confirmed fossils are from about 3.4 billion years ago, while the oldest potential fossils have been found on Greenland and date back to about 3.8 billion years ago. There’s also a suggestion that carbon found in a 4.1 billion-year-old mineral called zircon could be biological in nature. However, scientists have so far been unable to confirm that.
Some researchers think it would have been impossible for life to survive the late heavy bombardment, so that our oldest ancestor must be from after this phase. There are claims that the event would have sterilised the plants and vaporised any water around at the time. However, there are some recent mathematical models which suggest that pockets suitable for life could have remained.Holly Betts, “Ancestor of all life on Earth evolved earlier than we thought, according to our new timescale” at The Conversation
Earth is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old. That’s less time than ever for complex cellular dynamics to just sort of swish into place one day … but maybe the researchers who don’t discuss the problem are implicitly conceding that the chance scenario isn’t possible anyway. They can hardly do any harm by making the impossible less likely. 😉
See also: Earlier than thought: Worm burrows at rock layers over 600 million years ago
Researchers suggest: Life began on land not sea. And nearly 600 mya earlier than thought
Oldest known multicellulars are Ediacaran seaweed 555 mya
and
Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen
Researchers’ proposed timescale,
The picture of Earth in the linked article is at least as valuable as the article itself. Here’s a version without the title intruding.
And yet they don’t have a mechanism that can produce ATP synthase and they don’t have one to produce eukaryotes.
They can’t even get started
“Some researchers think it would have been impossible …”
After thousands of previous Would Have Been Impossibles have turned out to be possible, you’d think it Would Be Impossible for sensible scientists to make this claim.
Life has a way of breaking through all impossibles.
Information precedes biological life. Moreover, information, like qualia for consciousness, is the ‘hard problem’ of life
And as Paul Davies had somewhat hypothesized in the preceding paper, information is now shown to be a cause rather than an effect.
Specifically, information has now been experimentally shown to have a ‘thermodynamic content’:
Of related note to immaterial information having a ‘thermodynamic content’, classical digital information was found to be a subset of ‘non-local’, (i.e. beyond space and time), quantum entanglement/information by the following method which removed heat from a computer by the deletion of data:
And in direct contradiction to Landauer’s (and Darwinian) contentions that immaterial information does not exist independent of matter and energy, Dr Vaccaro states in regard to the preceding thought experiment that “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”,
Here are a few more notes demonstrating the fact that ‘information is physical’:
Although the preceding is certainly very strong evidence for the physical reality of immaterial information, the coup de grace for demonstrating that immaterial information is its own distinct physical entity, separate from matter and energy, is Quantum Teleportation:
Moreover, this physically real quantum information which is shown to have, contrary to Landauer’s (and Darwinian) assertions, an existence that is separate from matter and energy, is also found to be ‘conserved’. That is to say, ‘the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.’
As well this physically real quantum information, which cannot be created or destroyed, is also now found in molecular biology on a massive scale. In every DNA and protein molecule:
Besides providing direct empirical falsification of Landauer’s claim, and neo-Darwinian claims in general, claims that say immaterial information does not exist apart from its representation on a physical medium, the implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, or course, being the fact that we now have very strong physical evidence directly implying that we do indeed have an eternal soul that lives beyond the death of our material bodies.
In the following video Stuart Hameroff states ‘it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verses and Music: