New vestiges of the first life on Earth discovered | Hacker News Reader

New vestiges of the first life on Earth discovered

phys.org

85 pointswglb11 comments

Vahrenkamp's discovery of living stromatolites on Sheybarah Island is a big deal for anyone interested in ancient life. It’s amazing to see how these organisms, which were some of the first to oxygenate our planet, are still around in extreme environments. This find could teach us much about how life began and survived on Earth. Plus, the idea of growing stromatolites in an aquarium and studying them up close is pretty exciting.I wonder what it would take to commercialize these organisms to the general public.

Sort of like pre-historic Sea Monkeys. I think that would be super cool to be able to grow at home.

How confident are we that these aren’t new organisms that arose from the same mechanisms that birthed the ancient ones? That is, are we sure these don’t resemble the first kinds of life because they were formed recently themselves?

> How confident are we that these aren’t new organisms that arose from the same mechanisms that birthed the ancient ones?

Having genetic similarity to other organisms would be a good clue that it's not some separate parallel biogenesis.

Of course, another way to look at it is that they both did arise the same way... From a parent even older. :p

My coffee table photobook may be of interest for anyone wanting a brief introduction to the advent of life on Earth.

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://impacts.to/

There's a timeline showing approximately when stromatolites make an appearance, relative to the start of the Universe.

Looks great. BTW the price is significantly higher when I click through to buy than it is on your site.

Thanks for letting me know. It looks like Blurb upped their prices.

That is one hell of a beautiful PDF. Amazing work!

It sounds like there's a many-thousand-square-km area to search for 15-cm patches, which would be difficult to do for humans (in extreme heat).

But a well-designed drone trained to visually recognize candidates would be a great service, and would minimize environmental disruption. Some enterprising (resume-builder) could directly contact the researcher in question...

By the way, for those confused, Ga means “giga annum” which is a fancy way of saying “a billion years.”

Panspermia has entered the chat! https://earthsky.org/space/perseverance-stromatolites-microb...

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