Oldest fossil ever found on Earth dating back 4.2bn years shows alien life on Mars is likely

It’s life, but not as we know it. The oldest fossil ever discovered on Earth shows that organisms were thriving 4.2 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

The microscopic bacteria, which were smaller than the width of a human hair, were found in rock formations in Quebec, Canada, but would have lived in hot vents in the 140F (60C) oceans which covered the early planet.

The discovery is the strongest evidence yet that similar organisms could also have evolved on Mars, which at the time still had oceans and an atmosphere, and was being bombarded by comets which probably brought the building blocks of life to Earth.

Oldest fossil ever found on Earth dating back 4.2bn years shows alien life on Mars is likely

First off, WOW...

The earth completed accreting and became an official planet around 4.3B years ago...
And life was prevalent enough to leave fossils 4.2B years ago....that means life existed on earth almost immediately upon formation...

WOW, just wow..

I know we have been moving the needle back ever further and further but this is stunning...

All hail science!!!

I remain hopeful extraterrestrial life will be confirmed in my lifetime...

Fingers crossed!!

-Chris

a reply to: Christosterone

Wow is right! This is massive!


Life finds a way.

People have little idea of how old the Earth is. Common sense would dictate it is far far older than the 4-or-so billion years science postulates. Somebody found a way to date it beyond 4B years. The number was big. People latched onto it and the rest is legend. Since then ... they've been playing it safe ... but it continues to age.

Cool thread, brother Chris. S&F

This also leads me to suspect that there are planets around other stars that harbor life as well.

The stellar nursery our star was born in probably had all of the necessary ingredients to seed life in the systems of other stars born in the same stellar nursery. The stars closest to us(within 100-200LY) may very well have been formed in the same stellar nursery as our own star.

Just a hypothesis, of course.

Well sometime 3 billion years ago was the first proposed bacteria life on earth.
it would be no surprise it could have sprouted earlier, or was in extremely isolated pockets.

Gotta remember, life that size on earth is like us looking out at our galaxy.
There could have been pockets of bacteria popping up all over the earth at different times for a billion years, and just as fast as they popped up, they could have gone extinct. The fossil record is very fragile in that sense.

a reply to: Christosterone

And they were extremophiles! Life is amazing. Too cool, isn't it.

a reply to: Christosterone

"All hail science!!!

I remain hopeful extraterrestrial life will be confirmed in my lifetime...

Fingers crossed!! "

Well, according to the article, they Already have.

The general science consensus seems to be...

That Life was "Seeded" on Earth and on Mars, by interstellar Comets/asteroids/meteors floating about the cosmos, to this present day. Apparently all the water on Earth also came from Ice Comets, or so one theory goes.

If this is the case, Life should be EVERYWHERE in the Universe, or at least our huge Galaxy.

As the building blocks are the same, travelling everywhere in space on these "Comets etc", then it can be surmised??, that all life in the Universe/Galaxy would be similar in construction, but perhaps not in evolution.....tho environmental effects would make some unique life forms...ie different gravity, temperatures etc etc..(tho Earth have quite a huge temp variance).

Just the Variance of life forms on our planet, shows what may be "Out There".

Perhaps..."WE" are the Aliens, after all???

a reply to: gort51

I am a firm believer in panspermia...

With thanks to Anaxogoras of Ancient Greece for the term...

-Chris

a reply to: Christosterone

I remain hopeful extraterrestrial life will be confirmed in my lifetime...

It already has been confirmed. You just don't want to believe it.

I suspect something like pan spermia for such early life.

Yeah, well try to explain that to the people who live in my town and swear up and down that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

a reply to: gort51

It's not too far a stretch to just imagine that man has preconceived too small of an animal kingdom. Life is generally a bio-genesis, so if we ever were to meet an alien, it's more likely they would be related to us than not just from the get-go.

As to the part about why isn't it "EVERYWHERE" then, invest in an Ant Farm. You will find, no matter how small the ants you start with, it will always become too full. At what point the ants are at, doesn't determinate if they are ants.

And technically this would be understanding that non-intelligent life is everywhere, the understanding that we know know there is life just generally 'out there' is a massive step closer to answering the question; yes there's life, what conditions make it intelligent?

a reply to: Christosterone

What if some of the life on earth... came from mars during the great bombardment..... or from the great bombardment to both planets.... dun dun duhhhhhhhh then the two planets warred... we annihilated each other.... some earthlings survived.... slowly creeping out of the cracks and crevaces to rebuild......

originally posted by: JDeLattre89
Yeah, well try to explain that to the people who live in my town and swear up and down that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

I was about to point out that those idiots still exist. It's about on par with believing the Earth is flat.

a reply to: Christosterone

This is astounding, groundbreaking news!

A fossil of that age is simply game changing in scientific terms, because it shows clearly that extremophiles were indeed among the first living things here on Earth, that life on this planet has been thriving since before the crust of the world actually fully cooled, meaning that the critters that have been discovered would have been living in some of the most trying circumstances that any creature in history has ever survived, and not just surviving in those circumstances, but thriving by the sounds of things.

I am absolutely awash with glee at this discovery. I can only hope that this revelation leads to even more astounding breakthroughs. This is the sort of discovery that could easily drive an enormous evolution of understanding, which would be quite synergistic really!

When we consider that first life was formed from chemical bonds, its not hard to imagine that life may have started as soon as conditions were right for the chemicals to come together and start forming proteins etc etc etc.

Maybe Mars could have never had the chance to develop life like ours because of an unsustainable atmosphere. Maybe some of those proteins got blown to Earth.

originally posted by: JDeLattre89
Yeah, well try to explain that to the people who live in my town and swear up and down that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

and FLAT!!Ooops see trollz beat me to it... great minds etc etc

One of the greatest lies IMO has always been we as a life form are alone in the universe.. At 4.2 billion years of age the Earth had not been around for very long for life to take root so was it seeded or is it just a normal process ? Panspermia anyone ?.

(I type to slow for a rapid response team !)

originally posted by: Snarl
People have little idea of how old the Earth is. Common sense would dictate it is far far older than the 4-or-so billion years science postulates. Somebody found a way to date it beyond 4B years. The number was big. People latched onto it and the rest is legend. Since then ... they've been playing it safe ... but it continues to age.

Cool thread, brother Chris. S&F

40 years ago in school it was 13.5 billion years old we were taught , and the earth was expanding ! , The weird thing is people my own age from other areas were never taught this or many other things that i thought were the norm

a reply to: Lulzaroonie

I think that one of the interesting things about these critters, is that they may have come about during the period where the atmosphere was over rich in greenhouse gasses, but poor in terms of what we know of today, as life sustaining chemical content.

What sort of biological processes was this thing capable of? This discovery has so many potentially interesting offshoots!

Guess they better re-write all those history books, and update all those scientific timelines. Again.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: Lulzaroonie

I think that one of the interesting things about these critters, is that they may have come about during the period where the atmosphere was over rich in greenhouse gasses, but poor in terms of what we know of today, as life sustaining chemical content.

What sort of biological processes was this thing capable of? This discovery has so many potentially interesting offshoots!

I think it's very much how they came about. As the greenhouse gasses raise and lower temperatures, chemical reactions occur at all levels and there is probably so much stuff in our atmosphere now so far removed from how it began on this planet (if we can assume all life on this planet has always stayed here, excepting the stuff we send into space and leave there like space litter bugs).

I read this amazing, but really REALLY long article on how life was formed, even at the molecular DNA level and it really blew my mind. How Life on Earth Began It's pretty recent, written in the last couple of months, and the findings in that kind of support this finding of small organisms.