(04-09-2022, 07:11 PM)Anubis Wrote: do you think humanoid reptoids exist?

Quote:Many materialists believe that the severe unlikelihood of the series of events required for the origin of life is not a serious problem because there is essentially unlimited time for these events to occur. George Wald expressed this sentiment in 1954, writing in [i]Scientific American[/i], “Time is in fact the hero of the plot.” Since he believed there were billions of years available for the origin of life on Earth, Wald poetically hoped, “Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: Time itself performs the miracles.”1 But time isn’t unlimited. 

A Hostile Environment

First, the early Earth was a hostile environment for any nascent biomolecules and even early life. While the Earth formed at about 4.54 billion years ago, the crust did not begin to solidify until about 4.4 to perhaps as late as 4 billion years ago.2 Second, large bolide impact events occurred during the “heavy bombardment period” which lasted on Earth until about 3.8 billion years ago3 — impacts large enough to vaporize the oceans and sterilize Earth’s surface of any early life or prebiotic molecules.4 Third, there is now good evidence of cellular life existing as early as 3.77 billion years ago based upon the presence of microfossils in jasper cherts in the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada.5

Does this evidence imply less than 30 million years from the point at which Earth became habitable to the evidence of the first life? That may seem like a long time, but on geological timescales it is considered short. 

The Earliest Life

Indeed, decades after Wald, such fossil evidence of early life led theorists to say things like “we are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the Earth’s surface and the origin of life”6 and “we are now thinking, in geochemical terms, of instant life…”7 While the precise dates of the earliest life and estimates of the onset of Earth habitability vary and these issues are debated vigorously in the literature, the point is clear: There is not unlimited time for the origin of life. 

Time is [i]not[/i] the hero of the plot; rather, it is the antagonist. The Herculean feats required by origin-of-life models are matched only by the poverty of resources available on the early Earth in terms of time and available chemical reactants. No wonder Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who co-discovered the structure of DNA, lamented, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”8 Based upon current knowledge, the first life could not have arisen by purely natural means. 

(03-10-2022, 08:32 PM)RuudVanNistelrooy Wrote:

Quote:Many materialists believe that the severe unlikelihood of the series of events required for the origin of life is not a serious problem because there is essentially unlimited time for these events to occur. George Wald expressed this sentiment in 1954, writing in [i]Scientific American[/i], “Time is in fact the hero of the plot.” Since he believed there were billions of years available for the origin of life on Earth, Wald poetically hoped, “Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: Time itself performs the miracles.”1 But time isn’t unlimited. 

A Hostile Environment

First, the early Earth was a hostile environment for any nascent biomolecules and even early life. While the Earth formed at about 4.54 billion years ago, the crust did not begin to solidify until about 4.4 to perhaps as late as 4 billion years ago.2 Second, large bolide impact events occurred during the “heavy bombardment period” which lasted on Earth until about 3.8 billion years ago3 — impacts large enough to vaporize the oceans and sterilize Earth’s surface of any early life or prebiotic molecules.4 Third, there is now good evidence of cellular life existing as early as 3.77 billion years ago based upon the presence of microfossils in jasper cherts in the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada.5

Does this evidence imply less than 30 million years from the point at which Earth became habitable to the evidence of the first life? That may seem like a long time, but on geological timescales it is considered short. 

The Earliest Life

Indeed, decades after Wald, such fossil evidence of early life led theorists to say things like “we are left with very little time between the development of suitable conditions for life on the Earth’s surface and the origin of life”6 and “we are now thinking, in geochemical terms, of instant life…”7 While the precise dates of the earliest life and estimates of the onset of Earth habitability vary and these issues are debated vigorously in the literature, the point is clear: There is not unlimited time for the origin of life. 

Time is [i]not[/i] the hero of the plot; rather, it is the antagonist. The Herculean feats required by origin-of-life models are matched only by the poverty of resources available on the early Earth in terms of time and available chemical reactants. No wonder Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who co-discovered the structure of DNA, lamented, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”8 Based upon current knowledge, the first life could not have arisen by purely natural means. 

Quote:Right at this moment, there is a problem with our understanding of Earth’s core and it’s something that’s emerged only over the last year or two. The problem is a serious one. We do not now understand how the Earth’s magnetic field has lasted for billions of years. We know that the Earth has had a magnetic field for most of its history. We don’t know how the Earth did that. We have less of an understanding now than we previously thought we had a decade ago of how the Earth’s core has operated throughout history.