> I currently tend to believe that as far as abiogenesis/evolution goes, life was "seeded" in some way on the planet, i.e. given a head start vs arising spontaneously from primordial soup within 800M years.
It really depends on what you think the seed was.
The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and we have pretty good records of life on it and the evolutionary steps that took place going about about 3 billion of those with reasonable evidence of life for another billion before that (the 800 million years later part that you reference).
So, if life got seeded onto the planet, it happened before then and would have to have been in the form of small carbon-based molecules.
There's some debate in the field if life evolved genetics first or metabolism first. But the 'seed' would be the same in both cases, it's just that the pathway to get to modern life would be different.
Essentially they show that genomes have been doubling in size on average every 350 million years or so. If you project that math backward, you end with life starting, not at the beginning of Earth, but at the beginning of time, coinciding eerily with the Big Bang.
That points to a theory that carbon, water, and other elements we thought developed later might have been created earlier in the universe than expected. That would then point to the building blocks for life being essentially 'seeded' everywhere in the universe. Waiting to wake up as soon as conditions were right.
It really depends on what you think the seed was.
The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and we have pretty good records of life on it and the evolutionary steps that took place going about about 3 billion of those with reasonable evidence of life for another billion before that (the 800 million years later part that you reference).
So, if life got seeded onto the planet, it happened before then and would have to have been in the form of small carbon-based molecules.
There's some debate in the field if life evolved genetics first or metabolism first. But the 'seed' would be the same in both cases, it's just that the pathway to get to modern life would be different.
The most compelling case that I'm aware of for these small carbon-based molecules to originate somewhere other than Earth is this paper: https://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/174...
Essentially they show that genomes have been doubling in size on average every 350 million years or so. If you project that math backward, you end with life starting, not at the beginning of Earth, but at the beginning of time, coinciding eerily with the Big Bang.
That points to a theory that carbon, water, and other elements we thought developed later might have been created earlier in the universe than expected. That would then point to the building blocks for life being essentially 'seeded' everywhere in the universe. Waiting to wake up as soon as conditions were right.