Y'all wanna have your minds explode? If you like this topic, this is a FANTASTIC article!
Geneticists used Moore's law in reverse to determine the origin of life in the universe to be 9.5 billion years ago, +-2.5 billion years. we know life on earth is only 3 billion years old
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t?s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore?s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.
That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity?the origin of life?
Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. ?Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,? they say.
And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.
However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.
There?s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists.
But it is also provocative, interesting and exciting. All the more reason to debate it in detail.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381: Life Before Earth
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Moore's Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review
