Re:What If Life Did Not Originate on Earth?
by dragonwriter on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @08:40PM
(#20398197)
> So that means that biogenesis happened only once.
No, it just means that only one lineage did well enough in competition that we can find examples to study its biomarkers.
Or that there are factors we don't yet understand that favor similar biomarkers in independent lineages.
Or...luck.
> if biogenesis happened only once (for all of our bio examples), then it is either a rare event that just happened to occur very shortly after the planet cooled, or it happened sometime before Earth was hospitable for life and elsewhere in the universe.
Or biogenesis itself changed the environment in a way which made it no longer conducive to biogenesis.
No, it just means that only one lineage did well enough in competition that we can find examples to study its biomarkers.
Or that there are factors we don't yet understand that favor similar biomarkers in independent lineages.
Or...luck.
> if biogenesis happened only once (for all of our bio examples), then it is either a rare event that just happened to occur very shortly after the planet cooled, or it happened sometime before Earth was hospitable for life and elsewhere in the universe.
Or biogenesis itself changed the environment in a way which made it no longer conducive to biogenesis.