Comment on Whales
BakerBagel@midwest.social 5 days agoBiogenesis is crazy hard. Once that first lifeform appears it absorbs pretty much all available resources and takes over from there. All those conplex molecules just floating around get incorporated into the life form that appears first. Those primordial seas were constantly churning things about so life would have quickly spread across the ocean once it formed.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
But that applies to life as we know it today right? The first life forms couldn’t have taken over the earth instantly, they weren’t battle hardened bacteria, but very simples beings, not far from overly complex proteins. Probably took at least some million years for a microbe to spread around the earth, just from the sheer size of it. So in that time, life could originate from other similar primordial soups.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 4 days ago
Once they get going they reproduce like crazy. And there wouldn’t have been any competition for that first life form, so is growth would only be hindered by how many nutrients were available. Churning oceans and storms would have spread that first life form would only needaybe a couple centuries to spread across the Earth, while that leap from self replicateling macromolecules to actual life form would have simultaneously been way harder tham you think.