Life Before Earth   
      
    Alexei A. Sharov, Richard Gordon   
      
   (Submitted on 28 Mar 2013)   
      
   An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times   
   suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started   
   from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent   
   to a nucleotide. The genetic    
   complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional   
   nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially due to several positive   
   feedback factors: gene cooperation, duplication of genes with their subsequent   
   specialization, and    
   emergence of novel functional niches associated with existing genes. Linear   
   regression of genetic complexity on a log scale extrapolated back to just one   
   base pair suggests the time of the origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This   
   cosmic time scale for    
   the evolution of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion   
   years to reach the complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life   
   originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different   
   from those envisaged on Earth;   
    there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth,   
   thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent   
   aliens; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of the origin   
   of life from scratch    
   may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and the Drake equation for   
   guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as   
   intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe. Evolution of   
   advanced organisms has    
   accelerated via development of additional information-processing systems:   
   epigenetic memory, primitive mind, multicellular brain, language, books,   
   computers, and Internet. As a result the doubling time of complexity has   
   reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we    
   discuss the issue of the predicted technological singularity and give a   
   biosemiotics perspective on the increase of complexity.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)