It appears that you are tacitly presuming that life typically co-evolves with a stellar system and that implicitly, life of earth complexity took a maximum of ~4.5b years to evolve(?). If this is case I’m curious what your thoughts on the recent paper by Sharov and Gordon might be. The paper applies statistical arguments to genomic complexity of earth organisms and argues that life as we know it on earth may in fact have taken as much as 9+/-2.5bn years to evolve (predating earth and the local star, potentially up to approximately the entire history of our galaxy and a significant percentage of the history of the stellar epoch)?
If life of complexity similar to that currently on Earth does take as much as 11.5 billion years to evolve, that does not leave a very large window for forerunner biologies and would tend to increase the probability that Earth life is in fact some of the most complex life to ever even have the opportunity to arise in our current light cone.
Is the position of their paper (basically: that life takes longer to evolve than we think) something you are already planning to address further in your article series? I’d be interested to hear what your interpretation might be.
It appears that you are tacitly presuming that life typically co-evolves with a stellar system and that implicitly, life of earth complexity took a maximum of ~4.5b years to evolve(?). If this is case I’m curious what your thoughts on the recent paper by Sharov and Gordon might be. The paper applies statistical arguments to genomic complexity of earth organisms and argues that life as we know it on earth may in fact have taken as much as 9+/-2.5bn years to evolve (predating earth and the local star, potentially up to approximately the entire history of our galaxy and a significant percentage of the history of the stellar epoch)?
If life of complexity similar to that currently on Earth does take as much as 11.5 billion years to evolve, that does not leave a very large window for forerunner biologies and would tend to increase the probability that Earth life is in fact some of the most complex life to ever even have the opportunity to arise in our current light cone.
Is the position of their paper (basically: that life takes longer to evolve than we think) something you are already planning to address further in your article series? I’d be interested to hear what your interpretation might be.