Life May Have Gotten Started On Earth Almost Immediately
A tiny, tiny piece of graphite has been analyzed and shown to have possibly been produced biologically. Nothing new there… micro-organisms produce graphite just through the natural course of things. The neat bit here, though, is that the chunk of graphite has been dated to 4.1 billion years ago.
The graphite in question was trapped within a western Australian zircon crystal formed during the Hadean period (4.6 to 4.0 billion years ago, when Earth was, as the name suggests, a molten Hell hole, with asteroids and comets regularly plunging out of the sky).
If this is an actual sign of life 4.1 billion years old, it’s a sign that life had evolved (or arrived) on Earth within 500 million years of Earth coalescing from a primordial cloud, and 400 million years after the impact that created the Moon. This pushes up the appearance of life in the geological record by several hundred million years. This indicates that either life is more readily evolvable than previously thought, or perhaps was drifting around in space even earlier. Either explanation would mean that the chances of life elsewhere in the universe are increased.
Here’s a link to the official paper: