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Life May Have Evolved In Ice
Philip Bailey writes "An article in this month's Discover Magazine claims that some of the fundamental organic molecules required for the development of life could have spontaneously arisen within ice. Scientist Stanley Miller was responsible for seminal experiments in the 1950s in this area. He used sparks and a mixture of inorganic chemicals to test his theories, but turned to low temperature experiments in later years. He was able to create the constituents of RNA and proteins from a mixture of cyanide, ammonia and ice in trials lasting up to 25 years. A process known as eutectic freezing is thought to be the basis of these results: small pockets of liquid water, in which foreign molecules are concentrated enormously, increases the reaction rates, and more than compensates for temperature-related slowing."
Yes, "Hadean Earth pretty much lasted until then", give or take a billion years or so, pretty much.
Keep in mind that multicellular life has only existed for the past 200 million years, so these aren't exactly coffee breaks we're talking about. We already knew that ice can cover most of the earth within a few millenia, and as we are quickly finding out, it can disappear even faster than that if you put in a little effort. Ice reflects light, cooling off the earth, and water absorbs light, warming it, so both extremes are stable. This pleasant assortment of varied climates isn't necessarily inevitable or stable at all. According to the iceball-earth theory, the thing that eventually stopped it was volcanic activity, which put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The Earth probably has about another billion years of useful life left before the sun has its midlife crisis, so this party is "almost over" so to speak. But we're talking about time scales that render irrelevant little things like global warming and human-triggered melting of the poles- minor events that have consequences for only a few million years. We're releasing carbon that was buried during the swampy Carboniferous era, which was only a few hundred million years ago- practically last week. Once we're gone, the carbon is going to condense on the ground in the form of plant matter, get buried again over millions of years as before, and someone will dig it up again, and burn it in one of the great cycles of life.
With a billion years left, the Earth probably has time for about three or four more infestations of technological species like us, species that communicate, make tools, and burn things. We probably will just happen to have been the first in a series. Not much of our crap will remain, but just imagine what the impact on human culture would have been if we kept digging up stuff previously buried by a former technological species. I wish I could be around when it eventually happens, to see whether we'll be reviled, worshiped, or ignored.
Soup?
I have imbibed entire nascent civilsations with a single swig of my primordial G&T.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You might want to check your facts.
Yeah, a few hundred million years here, a few hundred million there, and soon you're talking about a seriously long time. But if you look at that timeline, an animal with the brains required for technology would have been wildly improbable more than 200 million years ago ago. The Cambrian explosion was 500 million years ago, but for a long time after that there weren't really any good brains to work with yet- just reptilian and amphibian structures. The neocortex evolved very recently, and here we are. I don't think we'll be the last animals to have conversations like this one. Animals have been getting smarter and smarter in general.
everything has always said 3 to 5 billion years.
That's from the Sun's point of view. While it's true that we do have 3 billion years until the oceans are completely boiled away, and 5 billion before the actual red giant phase, in only 1 billion years the solar output will be 10% greater than today's and the Earth will experience a runaway greenhouse effect that will raise its temperature by 50-100 degrees, making it resemble Venus.