Related papers: On the Rate of Abiogenesis from a Bayesian Informa…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
If two physical timescales are independent, i.e. they depend on different physics, then (statistically) there is no reason to believe that their values should be equal, even to an order of magnitude. The timescale for abiogenesis…
Estimates of the time at which life arose on Earth make use of two types of evidence. First, astrophysical and geophysical studies provide a timescale for the formation of Earth and the Moon, for large impact events on early Earth, and for…
It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…
In a recent paper [1] Lineweaver and Davis performed a statistical analysis to claim that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth indicates high probability of biogenesis on terrestrial- type planets. We argue that the rapid appearance of life…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
A recent study reported that there is evidence life may have originated prior to the formation of the Earth. That conclusion was based on a regression analysis of a certain data set involving evolution of functional genome size across major…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
In a previous paper we addressed the question "Does the Rapid Appearance of Life on Earth Suggest that Life is Common in the Universe?" The non-observability of recent biogenesis is a self-selection effect that needs to be considered if…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
In the research on the origin of life, topics that can be considered reasonably shared by the generality of researchers are initially identified. It is then shown that the application of these principles to the results obtained with the…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate. The likelihood that entropy spontaneously becomes information can be calculated from first principles, and depends exponentially on the…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…