If life on earth came from a single point of origin – does this indicate life elsewhere in the universe is highly unlikely?
posted on December 29, 2012 01:59AM GMT
If life
on earth came from a single point of origin – does this indicate life elsewhere
in the universe is highly unlikely?
If all known life on earth has one common ancestor, (Theobald calculates that a universal common ancestor is at least 102,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors), does this suggest that there was one instance where chemicals in the ‘primordial soup’ ‘sparked into life’, and since that instance, there is no evidence to suggest that another event of the same nature has occurred since to start a new lineage of descendents?
If this is the case, wouldn’t it suggest that in the 4 billion or so years that the conditions on earth have been right to support life, and the occurrence of life emerging from chemicals only happened once, along with the fact that, as yet, science has been unable to replicate the stages taken by nature to go from primordial soup to a recognizable form of life, to single cell life, (no one has yet synthesized a "protocell" using basic components which would have the necessary properties of life), isn’t the genesis of life on earth a freakishly rare occurrence?
Surely life isn’t going to be commonplace throughout the universe either, especially when you consider that the conditions on earth have been right for well over a quarter of the 13.75 billion year age of the universe.
If Drakes Equation is to be used, where fl = fraction of those planets where life actually evolves, surely this number would have to be incredibly small. One in a million? 0.0001%? If the rest of the equation is left as Drake’s recommendations, the number of communicating civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy is likely to be 0.002 – realistically 0.
Isn’t this the reason scientists searching for extra-intelligent are asking – ‘Where is everyone?” and the reason we haven’t found any evidence for life existing or having ever existed in our neighboring planets and moons?
CITATIONS Theobald, D. L. 2010. A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature 465(May 13): 219-223. doi:10.1038/nature09014
If all known life on earth has one common ancestor, (Theobald calculates that a universal common ancestor is at least 102,860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors), does this suggest that there was one instance where chemicals in the ‘primordial soup’ ‘sparked into life’, and since that instance, there is no evidence to suggest that another event of the same nature has occurred since to start a new lineage of descendents?
If this is the case, wouldn’t it suggest that in the 4 billion or so years that the conditions on earth have been right to support life, and the occurrence of life emerging from chemicals only happened once, along with the fact that, as yet, science has been unable to replicate the stages taken by nature to go from primordial soup to a recognizable form of life, to single cell life, (no one has yet synthesized a "protocell" using basic components which would have the necessary properties of life), isn’t the genesis of life on earth a freakishly rare occurrence?
Surely life isn’t going to be commonplace throughout the universe either, especially when you consider that the conditions on earth have been right for well over a quarter of the 13.75 billion year age of the universe.
If Drakes Equation is to be used, where fl = fraction of those planets where life actually evolves, surely this number would have to be incredibly small. One in a million? 0.0001%? If the rest of the equation is left as Drake’s recommendations, the number of communicating civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy is likely to be 0.002 – realistically 0.
Isn’t this the reason scientists searching for extra-intelligent are asking – ‘Where is everyone?” and the reason we haven’t found any evidence for life existing or having ever existed in our neighboring planets and moons?
CITATIONS Theobald, D. L. 2010. A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature 465(May 13): 219-223. doi:10.1038/nature09014
