Researchers use Moore's Law to calculate that life began before Earth existed

On this semilog plot, the complexity
of organisms, as measured by the
length of functional non-redundant
DNA per genome counted by
nucleotide base pairs (bp), increases
linearly with time (Sharov, 2012).
Time is counted backwards in
billions of years before the present
(time 0). Credit: arXiv:1304.3381
[physics.gen-ph]
(Phys.org) —Geneticists Richard
Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine
Laboratory in Florida and Alexei
Sharov of the National Institute on
Aging in Baltimore have proposed, in
a paper uploaded to the preprint
server arXiv , that if the evolution of
life follows Moore's Law, then it
predates the existence of planet
Earth.
Moore's Law, of course, famously
suggests that the complexity of
computers grows at a rate of double
the transistors per circuit every two
years, resulting in exponential
growth. Looking at the complexity of
computers today and working
Moore's Law backwards shows that
the first microchips came about
during the 1960s, which is when
they were actually invented. In their
paper, Gordon and Sharov take the
same approach, only they apply it to
biological complexity .
The two researchers acknowledge
their ideas are more of a "thought
exercise" than a theory proposal,
but at the same time suggest their
calculations ought to be taken
seriously. They start with the idea of
genetic complexity doubling every
376 million years—working
backwards, they say, means that life
first came about almost 10 billion
years ago, which of course predates
the creation of Earth itself. Most
scientists agree the Earth formed
just 4.5 billion years ago. Assuming
that Moore's Law does apply to
biological complexity, this would
suggest that life began somewhere
other than on Earth and migrated
here.
Of course there are other
possibilities to explain what
happened, as the two acknowledge
—life could have evolved following
Moore's Law during certain periods
but not at others—a deep freeze
could have temporarily halted
changes in complexity, for example,
or cataclysmic events could have
periodically killed off the more
advanced biotic life forms. There is
also the possibility that the
development of life had to reach a
certain stage of development
before it began to conform to
Moore's Law. Then of course, there
is the very real possibility that the
beginnings and evolution of life
don't conform to Moore's Law at all.
Gordon and Sharov's paper is likely
to set off multiple rounds of
discussion regarding not just the
origin of life on Earth, but in the
galaxy as well. If life truly predates
our planet, and it can be proved,
what impact might that have on
religious thought and what might it
mean to those looking for meaning
in its very existence?
More information: Life Before
Earth, arXiv:1304.3381 [physics.gen-
ph] http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381
Abstract
An extrapolation of the genetic
complexity of organisms to earlier
times suggests that life began before
the Earth was formed. Life may have
started from systems with single
heritable elements that are
functionally equivalent to a
nucleotide. The genetic complexity,
roughly measured by the number of
non-redundant functional
nucleotides, is expected to have
grown exponentially due to several
positive feedback factors: gene
cooperation, duplication of genes
with their subsequent specialization,
and emergence of novel functional
niches associated with existing
genes. Linear regression of genetic
complexity on a log scale
extrapolated back to just one base
pair suggests the time of the origin
of life 9.7 billion years ago. This
cosmic time scale for the evolution
of life has important consequences:
life took ca. 5 billion years to reach
the complexity of bacteria; the
environments in which life
originated and evolved to the
prokaryote stage may have been
quite different from those envisaged
on Earth; there was no intelligent life
in our universe prior to the origin of
Earth, thus Earth could not have
been deliberately seeded with life by
intelligent aliens; Earth was seeded
by panspermia; experimental
replication of the origin of life from
scratch may have to emulate many
cumulative rare events; and the
Drake equation for guesstimating
the number of civilizations in the
universe is likely wrong, as intelligent
life has just begun appearing in our
universe. Evolution of advanced
organisms has accelerated via
development of additional
information-processing systems:
epigenetic memory, primitive mind,
multicellular brain, language, books,
computers, and Internet. As a result
the doubling time of complexity has
reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we
discuss the issue of the predicted
technological singularity and give a
biosemiotics perspective on the
increase of complexity.
via Arxiv blog