Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Life: the Origins

According to the best estimates available today, Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago.

Not long after that, in universal time scales, a big something slammed into earth heating things up. Really heating things up. The temperature was about 10,000 K(elvin) or about 17,500 F. This collision gave us the moon.

Earth melted. Then it cooled. Most evidence of pre-strike earth was destroyed.

Skip forward a second in galactic time. It is now a mere 3.2, maybe 3.7 billions years ago. Maybe a billion and a half years after the big crash. Here we find the first signs of life on earth.

Ignoring any biblical explanations for life, that seems to leave us here:

A) Life is easy to start. It sprang (back?) up immediately after earth was massively rearranged.

B) Life came from elsewhere shortly after the collision.

C) Estimates of when life began on earth put it way too far back.

D) The moon theory is wrong.

The moon formation theory has withstood 25 years of assault. D doesn't seem likely.

Life beginning has also withstood much testing. C doesn't seem likely either.

That means we're left with A or B and I think B implies A.

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