Has the Origins of Human Life on Earth Been Discovered?

There's a theory (a serious theory) that life started on Mars because Mars is smaller than Earth and therefore would have had a faster rate of geological evolution and then was transferred to Earth thanks to a meteorite ( chunks of Mars are ejected into space every once in a while, even more so three billion years ago when the planet was much more geologically active). If that's the case we may find that whatever residual life remains (maybe very deep underground) to be oddly similar to our most primitive lifeforms here on Earth.

 

“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one”, he said. “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one – but still they come!”

 

Life started up so quickly on Earth after it started cooling down from the Theia-Earth impact it makes just as much sense that it started out on Earth. If it existed on Mars as well, that's a good argument that life processes usually happen when the conditions and chemistry are right. It's not impossible to imagine all three planets in the Goldilocks zone harboring life a the same time, albeit briefly.

 

The conditions on Venus were once very similar to these on Earth but two things compromised that, one that Venus didn't have a large satellite that would have stabilized its axis and second that it was a little bit too close to the sun for its own good. The volcanoes started spewing hothouse effect gases that life there wasn't efficient enough to absorb and transform into coal/crude oil as it did on Earth. The production of coal and crude oil is the product of the cleaning up of our atmosphere.

 

Besides coal (primarily 360Ma to 300Ma before bacteria and fungi developed the enzymes necessary to break down lignin quickly) and oil (mostly 250Ma to 66Ma when there were lots of warm tropical seas stocked with plankton) carbon was also sequestered as carbonate rocks, of course, due to chemical weathering, transportation and deposition. The removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is thought a probable cause for major glaciations in addition to the variation in insolation due to the Milankovitch Cycle.

 

Your theory could be correct, for Tardigrades at least. Or perhaps ejected asteroids from both planets collided, mixed and other some time the new mixture of rocks fell into an orbit around Earth and then collided with Earth.

 

Not been doing your homework again, I see.

 

oh good, it's been awhile. i thought id have to retire this one

 

The science in Discovery is laughably bad. It's not a solid basis for an SF TV show nor for understanding how things work in reality. I can usually tolerate nonsense in other Star Trek (with isolated exceptions such as Threshold) but episode after episode of such drivel with its badly drawn characters was too much for me. Some people might like it - fine. It irritated rather than entertained me. I have The Expanse that I can watch for diversion. It has minor flaws in scientific credibility but at least the show runners make an effort.

 

It doesn't bother me. Makes about as much sense as the transporter and maybe a little more than Q, Apollo, and giant Abraham Lincolns

 

Yeah, let us not forget Spock's Brain. However, I was entertained not bored by that. God-like aliens with apparently magical powers are just retellings of Greek myths, of course. Who Mourns for Adonais? is just one obvious example. I don't mind those provided they amuse me. Maybe it's something lacking on my part that I don't dig a lot of modern Trek. Never mind.

 

Space Linoln was normal size...

 

That part is just insane. I mean not that the aliens had created a fake Lincoln because why not? But Kirk et al. acting around him as if he was the real thing...that makes absolutely no sense.

 

Sometimes I wonder if evolution can hold for inorganics..once you get it started:
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-simple-complex-semiconductors.html

We've even been able to get organics to have magnetic properties...
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-magnetism-2d-material-star-like-molecules.html

Maybe this isn't too far off the mark
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/the...s-or-cats-thread.307320/page-59#post-13878310

But if such a thing were possible....hmmm...high temp tholians start to make sense.

On human evolution, watch for falls
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-framework-stability.html

 

I don't think it's impossible. Interesting results have been reported for computer simulations of inorganic materials interacting with plasma (the state of matter not the blood kind).

'It might be life Jim...', physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities

 

Plasma being the most common state of matter in the universe, it's fun to imagine our definition of life being the odd outlier.

 

Yeah, there have been quite a few SF stories about life existing in the outer atmospheres of stars. If we were to discover life can form in multiple, very distinct environments, it would begin to look like our universe is tuned to produce it - although probably by there being very many more that do not harbour life.

 

This phase of the universe is also an angstrom in the blink of an eye compared to universal timeline. If sentient species chose to continue their evolutionary path, a way would need to be found to either live within black hole horizons or in and around white dwarfs. That will be the bulk of existence after the Degenerate Era, if the current model is correct.

 

Before that happens we have billions of billions of billions of billions...of years. That is to say more than enough time for our species to decay into extinction on its own without any external causes.

 

There won't be any white dwarfs (or stars) around after a few hundred billion years - they'll be black dwarfs. The problem becomes how to extract usable work when everywhere is approaching the same temperature. Evaporating black holes will likely be the last oases of sentient life although the clock rates or processes there are likely to appear very slow from what we are used to.