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New Scientist: Life got started many times

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From Penny Sarchet at New Scientist:

Rather than springing into existence just once in some chemically blessed primordial pond, life may have had many origins. It could have got going over and over again in many different forms for hundreds of thousands of years, only becoming what we see today when everything else was wiped out it in Earth’s first ever mass extinction. In its earliest days on the planet, life as we know it might not have been alone. More.

And it is not happening all around us now because …

Oh wait! That is a Boltzmann brain floating above the inkjet printer…

Is the Boltzmann brain a protected species? I better find out.

Note: One could subscribe to read the whole thing. One wishes NS (and many other publications) would charge (reasonably) to read the individual articles instead of assuming that one wishes to hear from them for the rest of one’s life about hundreds of topics.

See also: Rabbi Moshe Averick on alleged “primitive” life

and

What we know and don’t know about the origin of life

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Comments
OK, from a purely statistical point of view, what are the odds that Life started INDEPENDENTLY at 10 separate locations AND ALL of the descendants of those 10 have IDENTICAL base structures for how genes and chromosomes and DNA and RNA and junk work? Is that why the Latin alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphics and Arabic script and Chinese pictographs are so identical? In the first place, they just made Life on Earth perhaps a gazillion times more UNlikely by saying each of the original clusters arose independent of the others. So each start on Earth would be at least as unlikely as Life arising on the mythical Earth 2. And in the second place, is there ANY life on Earth that is so bizarre that it shares NONE of its basic biochemistry with any other life?mahuna
August 21, 2016
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The "chemically blessed primordial pond" is a Victorian Era myth. Come on please - different kinds of life popped up all over.ppolish
August 18, 2016
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