Life shown to be on Earth 4 billion years ago:

http://www.sciencealert.com/new-fossil-discovery-points-to-life-on-earth-nearly-4-billion-years-ago

Originally posted by @sonhouse
http://www.sciencealert.com/new-fossil-discovery-points-to-life-on-earth-nearly-4-billion-years-ago

the implications of life starting so early is that it suggests that under the right conditions life very readily quickly and likely comes into existence on a planet. This implies alien life is common place in the universe including in the Milky way. However, the fossil record suggests it took a relatively very long time (most of Earth's history of life) just to go from singled-cell life to multicellular thus suggesting for some reason this is an extremely rare and difficult step thus implying nearly all if not all alien life is just boring microbes and there is extremely little if any intelligent alien life. Well that is my thoughts on it.

I'm not at all sure of that Earth is seeded from space. I hold that for improbable.
I'm not sure that life has evolved only one time. I think that our life is the one that survived. I can think that over some time more than one life existed, side by side.
Mitochondria is one organism that evolved, side by side by 'us', now living in symbiosis with our cells, with their own kind of DNA.

Originally posted by @fabianfnas
I'm not at all sure of that Earth is seeded from space. I hold that for improbable.
I'm not sure that life has evolved only one time. I think that our life is the one that survived. I can think that over some time more than one life existed, side by side.
Mitochondria is one organism that evolved, side by side by 'us', now living in symbiosis with our cells, with their own kind of DNA.

The record says life started several times. The interesting question to me is suppose life, microbial or otherwise, is found on Mars or some of the outer planet moons, Europa for instance, in the under ice oceans, what would be very interesting to me is the storage technique, would there be something like our DNA or would there be other ways nature can come up with to mimic DNA, a different shape for instance, a twisted box instead of a twisted ladder or maybe a twisted triangular shape perhaps, or would our style of DNA, a twisted ladder shape be the universal standard. If that was so, then life anywhere on a habitable planet would be perhaps leading to our style, bipeds, humanoidish kind of creatures. Time will tell. The main question is it going to be say in the nest 30 years or the next 300 or the next 3000?

Originally posted by @sonhouse
.... would our style of DNA, a twisted ladder shape be the universal standard. If that was so, then life anywhere on a habitable planet would be perhaps leading to our style, bipeds, humanoidish kind of creatures.

Obviously silly. All life on earth has our "style" of DNA (unless you consider linear vs. plasmid as distinct styles), but only a small fraction is bipedal.

Originally posted by @sonhouse
The record says life started several times.

This is news to me. Have you got a link for that?
IF there is good scientific evidence that it started several times then the implications of that are huge for it would mean alien life (but probably just microbial) almost certainly would be just about everywhere in the galaxy and the universe wherever there is liquid water roughly in those early-Earth-like conditions.

I thought this was the Science Forum, not the Science Fiction Forum.
Maybe Russ can start a new forum and then this tripe can be discussed along side such other hot-button topics as how dilithium, when placed in a high-frequency electromagnetic field, eddy currents are induced in its structure which keep charged particles away from the crystal lattice, and, how inturn, this prevents it from reacting with antimatter when so energized, because the antimatter particles never actually touch it and that therefore, it is used to contain and regulate the annihilation reaction of matter and antimatter in a starship's warp core, which otherwise would explode from the uncontrolled annihilation reaction.
In light of those facts and although low-quality artificial crystals can be grown or replicated, they are limited in the power of the reaction they can regulate without fragmenting, and are therefore largely unsuitable for warp drive applications.
Then it can be discussed how, due to the need for natural dilithium crystals for interstellar travel, deposits of this material are, much like real-world equivalents such as oil, a highly contested resource, and as such, dilithium crystals have led to more interstellar conflict than all other reasons combined.
At least then, we'd be rightly entertained, yes?

Originally posted by @humy
This is news to me. Have you got a link for that?
IF there is good scientific evidence that it started several times then the implications of that are huge for it would mean alien life (but probably just microbial) almost certainly would be just about everywhere in the galaxy and the universe wherever there is liquid water roughly in those early-Earth-like conditions.

Whenever we find extraterrestrial life, a very interesting question is whether it is based on DNA (meaning a common ancestor) or something else (meaning that life has evolved independently from ours).
The question if Earth was seeded is one of the most interesting questions in this field!

Originally posted by @sonhouse
http://www.sciencealert.com/new-fossil-discovery-points-to-life-on-earth-nearly-4-billion-years-ago

This is new?

Originally posted by @whodey
This is new?

It puts back the date of the earliest known life by quite a bit, if confirmed.

Originally posted by @wildgrass
Obviously silly. All life on earth has our "style" of DNA (unless you consider linear vs. plasmid as distinct styles), but only a small fraction is bipedal.

Sure, but I was talkiing about the method of information storage via different shaped kinds of DNA, also I would imagine it would not even be the same big 4 we use in our DNA, maybe they have 6 units, 10, who knows what can pop up in an independent generation of life a thousand light years from home? My guess is life will show up on any planet halfway habitable, if it is 200 degrees F, it is not boiling and life can exist in that condition, extremophiles could show up anywhere there is a heat source as we have proven in the undersea vents which shoots up super heated water at such high pressure it is still liquid but providing energy for life down there. But since life on Earth has pretty much always been our vanilla DNA, the bits and pieces of life would end up on the ocean floor and evolution would do the rest. My guess is that will happen anywhere we find some kind of heat source and liquid water and minerals like phos and sulfur and iron and so forth. A few hundred years from now I am betting we will find exactly that. Like life in the liquid ocean under Europan ice and the geysers shooting up from Encaledus for instance just a flyby collecting samples may be all it would take, get the samples to earth, it is liquid water shooting through cracks in the ice layer so it would be a sample of deep water and if there were microbes in it they would end up in the stream and could be collected by a spacecraft.