World's Oldest Fossils Found In Greenland (washingtonpost.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Washington Post: Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago. It's a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth's early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe. A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures," published Wednesday in Nature. The report adds: "Subsequent laboratory analysis established that the formation is 3.7 billion years old, and turned up additional chemical signatures consistent with a biological origin for the conical structures, Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist, said. These scientists determined the age of the rocks through radiometric dating, measuring the abundance of elements created by the steady decay of uranium."

Comments

Re:Wrong

[Camel Pilot]

A slashdot meme... any story on evolution and someone will post something inane about 6000 years with the first 5 posts.

Re:Wrong

[Black Parrot]

Right. Levinthals paradox makes the Earths age a DONTCARE. Order-of proton life-time to form one amuzing polypeptide. Since life can't happen at all, it can only happen once.

Actually it's about folding into a specific configuration rather than "forming". Also it assumes no mechanism other than chance, which is where lots of these arguments go astray.

Re:Wrong

[Michael Woodhams]

You're a bit early. By Bishop Ussher's chronology, the world will be 6019 years old in about 7 weeks.

That said, although Ussher's chronology is the best known, other biblical/historical chronologies exist varying by decades or more from this.

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the "it's just a theory" meme repeated so many times by Americans that I'm really starting to question the education level of most of the Americans. Most? Yes, most (meaning the majority).

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Tina Fay quotes! She's snarky, so she must be smart.

Someone finally found...

[MindPrison]

...Cowboy Neal.

Re:Wrong

[dargaud]

Yeah, and now they are exporting this shit in other countries. There are now antivaxers with public stands on european markets. Fake schoolbook publishers with anti-evolution agenda who send free books to public schools. Hell, I've a website with plenty of Antarctic pictures and I recently received email from a guy who was trying to get me to admit that at the poles there are hidden proofs that the earth is flat !!!

Stupidity of this magnitude should make you too poor to be able to waste your time on trying to export stupid beliefs like that onto other people.

is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[HBI]

I do believe this a serious article.

That said, the commentary is a little speculative. With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[jandersen]

With a sample size of one, the conclusions we can draw about life across the universe are very limited.

If this was all we had to go on, certainly. However, we do have a fairly good outline of ideas about how life arose from chemistry on this planet, and it doesn't look like there was anything very unusual about Earth; in fact, it looks a lot like life is something that is almost inevitable, when the conditions are not too hostile. Finding very early fossils fit into this - they don't prove that we are right, but it does seem that life on Earth arose as soon as the conditions had barely settled down. Of course, most of us would love for life to be abundant all across the universe, so it doesn't take much to persuade us - that's something to keep in mind.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[HBI]

Did panspermia get ruled out while I wasn't watching?

If that ends up being the reason life arose here, then we actually don't know that much about the chemistry that begat life. I have seen lots of ideas about how we might end up with amino acids but not a lot about how that would turn into a cell.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[serviscope_minor]

The conclusions are limited, but the quicker life popped up, the more likely it is that it's somehow easier to get started. Of course it's possible you get your 20 heads in a row on the first 20 coin flips, but that's not likely. And, if you know the coin is biased then when you get your first 20 in a row tells you something about how biased the coin is.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[Sique]

Panspermia in general is just some side hypothesis without much science behind. Organic compounds are quite aboundant in space, and they form spontaneoulsly if conditions are right, so there is no need to hypotheze that the organic compounds on Earth had some extraterrestical origin. Some of them might actually come from somewhere else, but organic compounds tend to be quite fragile when it comes to the conditions around a meteorite impact, and the few molecules that survive tend to be drown into lakes and puddles with billions of other organic molecules already there.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[Maritz]

Panspermia looks less likely to be necessary as time goes on. It's a more convoluted explanation.

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[MightyMartian]

The biggest problem with panspermia, other than suggesting that life could survive thousands or millions of years in hard vacuum in the very hostile environment of a young solar system to seed another planet than the one it originated on is simply "Why do we need it as an explanation." Since the current abiogenesis theories mainly require some organic chemistry and lots of excess energy, is there some reason the early Earth, with all the bombardments and likely huge amounts amount of energy available via volcanism and other geological forces, wouldn't fit that bill?

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[MightyMartian]

The problem here is that rocks of this age are pretty damned rare, and only a few locations on Earth have them. And really, this ID geologist (about as unreliable a source as I can imagine) isn't really representing how geologists work at all. Where there are lots of samples, that might make things easier, but where there isn't, you work with what you have. It's not as if stromatolites are rare, and there are a few locations where there are very ancient stromatolites, so if you find one that dates earlier, why is that somehow invalid?

Re:is there a reason the posting is 100% troll?

[Fragnet]

That's because this isn't the first time someone has claimed to find the oldest, only for it to turn out the structures were formed by the action of scalding water on mineral sediments. Nick Lane describes this in some detail in his book, Life Ascending.

Re:Wrong

[QRDeNameland]

"Ha ha ha! I am a prankster God. I am killing me!" - Bill Hicks

Re:Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

That an editor here (with a long shameful record of idiotic mistakes in summaries) resorted to a false quote about seeing Russia, and a straw-man argument about 6000 year old earth(borrowed from an obvious troll), says a lot about the ignorance and irrationality prevailing at slashdot now.
Pity! This was once a great website.

Re:Wrong

[serviscope_minor]

That's stupid, everyone knows the Earth isn't flat. The poles are there to hide the entrances to the INSIDE of the earth where the lizard men live. How could the earth have an inside anyway if it was flat? That makes no sense, see.

Re:Wrong

[Maritz]

You're hallucinating straw men. Scary stuff. Seriously, nothing he said is a straw man. Go learn what the hell that means.

Re:Wrong

[Maritz]

Literally have no idea what you're complaining about.

Re:More, and more

[Maritz]

Doesn't matter how unlikely it is, if the universe is infinite (e.g. eternal inflation exists). Then it really doesn't matter, other than how many universe diameters on average you have to travel before seeing a copy of earth. I've seen figures like ten to the ten to the one-twenty universe diameters. Can't be bothered looking up how to do superscript in this window. ;)

Re:More, and more

[NotAPK]

There are two trivial ways to do powers of ten in ASCII characters. 10^6 is one way, and can even be written long hand such as: 1.2345 x 10^6. The more compact form uses "e" for exponent and is called "scientific" or "engineering" notation, though some insist that "engineering" notation only allows multiples of 3 for the powers of ten. Anyway, I digress, use exponent notation like this: 1.234e6 or be explicit with the sign 1.234e+6 and for small values use 1.234e-6.

I think you were writing the range: "figures like 10^10 to 10^120 universe diameters"

Re:Wrong

[sudon't]

Stupidity is one of our biggest exports. See also: drug and alcohol prohibition.

Re:Wrong

[GLMDesigns]

Read up on it. It's interesting.

Bishop Ussher, along with many others, were curious to know how old the universe was. So he went to The Bible and started figuring things out. We knew dates - the razing the Temple, Babylon Captivity - but how to figure out the beginning.

Go to The Bible and add up the dates. 6 days for creation + one day of rest + this lifetime + that lifetime until you get to a known date. Then, voila, you have the age of the universe.

Simple really.

Re:Wrong

[serviscope_minor]

Oh I've been modded up. Doesn't say why. C'mon slashdot give me an "Informative"!

Re:Wrong

[dwillden]

That and Brawndo, It's got Electolytes!

Re:Wrong

[rgbatduke]

But the Earth IS flat. Well, locally flat. Sort of. A manifold, at any rate. Except for all of the fractally scaled bumps that extend down to the molecular level.

Come to think of it, the Earth isn't flat. In fact, it doesn't even have a surface. Just a highly irregular atomic-scale semi-fractal zone of Pauli-electrostatic intermolecular repulsion. The best that can be said is that at some particular coarse-grained scale, it is locally highly reminiscent of a truly flat planar surface osculating to a point in the average, sometimes.

Now the 6000 year bit -- yes, the earth has been around for 6000 years. Just like I've been around for 100% of the last two minutes. Unless one gets really serious about quantum fluctuations, where one could argue -- not necessarily perfectly reasonably -- that every elementary particle in my body flickers in and out of existence on the Heisenberg scale where \delta (mc^2) \delta t \approx \hbar. Following that argument, there is a near certainty that you could pick any instant you like and insist that the Earth "came into being" within an teeny bit of that instant...

Was it Helped?

[PineHall]

Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.
1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.
2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.
3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.
4) Life had outside help in getting started.
I personally believe that life is extremely hard to get going and with the evidence of life showing up even earlier, it makes it more likely that there was some outside help, i.e. a supernatural event.

Re:Was it Helped?

[serviscope_minor]

Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.

1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.

Well, it shows that it is liklier easier than expected. If it took only a 300 million years to start here then the best guess at the mode is of course 300 million years, say down from 500 million.

That of course implies that the window for life to evolve is likely shorter than we previously expected and naturally the number of places with a short window must be greater than or equal to the number of places with a longer window (in any remotely statistically sane universe, greater).

As the minimum window shortens, the number of opportunities for life to get started expands.

I don't think that proves the universe is full of life.

2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.

I don't see how it implies that. We don't know precisely how rare the event was but as the earliest point moves back, the event looks less rare than before.

3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.

Not really sure how it implies that. No matter what the distribution of life seeds arriving from outside, the narrower the window, the smaller chance life had to arrive from the outside. So it implies this option is less likely, but not by how much.

4) Life had outside help in getting started.

You've just deferred the problem, though to whatever gave rise to the outside helper.

i.e. a supernatural event.

Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.

Re:Was it Helped?

[Ranbot]

i.e. a supernatural event.

Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.

I personally don't follow any particular religion, but I don't think the tiny little corner of the universe and short time span humans have observed is enough to rule out the supernatural. The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover we don't know, such that denying at least the possibility of the supernatural is as much of a leap of faith in science keeping faith in a conventional religion.

Re:Was it Helped?

[PineHall]

Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.

1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.

Well, it shows that it is liklier easier than expected. If it took only a 300 million years to start here then the best guess at the mode is of course 300 million years, say down from 500 million.

That of course implies that the window for life to evolve is likely shorter than we previously expected and naturally the number of places with a short window must be greater than or equal to the number of places with a longer window (in any remotely statistically sane universe, greater).

As the minimum window shortens, the number of opportunities for life to get started expands.

I don't think that proves the universe is full of life.

2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.

I don't see how it implies that. We don't know precisely how rare the event was but as the earliest point moves back, the event looks less rare than before.

I see things differently. I believe you are saying that since the time period is shorter, the probability for life must be greater. (Correct me if I am wrong.) I start with a fixed (but unknown) small probability. Then by shortening the time period one makes it less likely life would form, because there are less cases where the needed ideal conditions exist for life to form.

3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.

Not really sure how it implies that. No matter what the distribution of life seeds arriving from outside, the narrower the window, the smaller chance life had to arrive from the outside. So it implies this option is less likely, but not by how much.

4) Life had outside help in getting started.

You've just deferred the problem, though to whatever gave rise to the outside helper.

i.e. a supernatural event.

Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.

Using that fixed probability and the shorten time period, I see the need to look for other opportunities, such as panspermia or a purposeful outside intervention (which may be a supernatural intervention). Personally I think there are enough stories of the supernatural miracles that you can not discount them. (One example is the rigorous process the Catholic Church goes through to verify miracles in their sainthood process. They have had atheists look at the evidence of a miracle to try to disprove it.)

Re:Was it Helped?

[mcswell]

Leaving aside the particular points (which others have already addressed), there's another implication:

5) It takes a long time--longer than we thought--for complex (multicellular) life to arise from simple life. The Ediacaran period (just prior to the Cambrian) is near the beginning of complex life, and is dated to roughly 0.6 billion years ago. If the Greenland rocks are evidence of bacterial life 3.7 billion years ago, then it took about 3 billion years for life to make the transition from bacterial to complex.

That in turn probably implies:

6) Life we find elsewhere in the universe is likely to be bacterial, not even unintelligent plant/ animal life.

(6) is a little less certain than (5); one could turn it around and say that if the average habitable planet we encounter is at least 4 or 5 billion years old, we're likely to encounter complex life. But we're back to the one data point problem; for all we know, the rise of complex life on Earth (probably triggered by some kind of cell-level symbiosis that gave rise to eukaryotic life) was a lucky event, and without that we'd all be bacteria.

Why fundamentalists can’t accept deep time

[Theovon]

Evolution implies death before sin. If there was death before sin, then “original sin” and Jesus’ atonment for that sin are meaningless. They’re not going to accept something that breaks their religion, because they have a deathly (no pun intended) fear of not having a life after death. They are also wrapped up in fear over some mythical “moral decline” that they believe is caused by moral relativism that they seem to think evolution implies.

What’s interesting is to uncover the inconsistences in their beliefs. They claim to read the Bible literally or “at face value.” But when it comes to original sin, the Bible is only clear about HUMAN SPIRITUAL death as a result of original sin. They extend this to physical death of all animals. But when pressed, they cannot identify specific Bible verses that speak to this. Rather, they fall back on an assumption they make about the meaning of “very good” which they ASSUME (a tendency they say is a problem with evolutionists) means there could have been no animal death before human sin. They presume too much to know the mind of God and what God may have thought was “very good” beyond what their Bible claims while trying to convince us that the primary source of truth should be the Bible.

They go on to create a subculture where evidence is something we can take or leave as we like as it fits or doesn’t fit our preconceptions. Then they turn around and call evolution a preconception. It was Christians who came up with the idea!