A more interesting paper is Life Before Earth, https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381, analyzing biological complexity and projecting into the past for an origin of 9.7 billion years ago.
> These attempts to explain the presumed origin of life on Earth are strikingly similar to stretching and shrinking of time scales in Biblical Genesis to fit preconceptions (Schroeder, 1990).
The definition of minimal life as a thing with a single nucleotide is weird. If I have to pick an arbitrary number, I'd choose at least 100. (Anyway, with their model they get that when the Earth appeared, "life" had ~10000 nucleotides.)
> In particular, photosynthesis or
chemosynthesis is needed to be independent from organic resources.
It's weird because the current estimation is that photosynthesis appeared like 1000 millions years after the fist cell. So if this article were correct and the initial cells population came from space, they probably would no have photosynthesis.
Whatever existed prior to life probably had life-like qualities, but couldn't fully meet the criteria, e.g., viruses. So even 0 nucleotides could make sense, if this prototypical organism had other features, and at some point, nucleotides arrived later.
OnlyOneCannolo|4 years ago
That's one hell of a refutation.
CryptoPunk|4 years ago
gus_massa|4 years ago
> In particular, photosynthesis or chemosynthesis is needed to be independent from organic resources.
It's weird because the current estimation is that photosynthesis appeared like 1000 millions years after the fist cell. So if this article were correct and the initial cells population came from space, they probably would no have photosynthesis.
JMTQp8lwXL|4 years ago