Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before...

Daily Galaxy ^ | 9/24/18

[LibWhacker]

Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before the Formation of Our Solar System”

Posted on Sep 24, 2018

 

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.

Our Solar Nebula formed from the remnants of an earlier star, suggesting that life from this period might be preserved in the original gas, dust and ice clouds. Life on Earth may be a continuation of a process that began many billions of years before the formation of our Solar System.

In a 2015 study, geneticists, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by the measure of Moore’s Law, life is older than the Earth itself.

The team takes Moore’s Law back to zero complexity and the origin of life, by measuring the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish, amphibians and eventually mammals. The result is an exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law with the doubling time, however, expanding to 376 million years rather than two years.

 

The application of 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.

The graph above shows 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).

Additionally they suggest that the 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 about every 20 years.

[minnesota_bound]

I see you found a fragment of the episode. BTW it is because of the female alien that there are men that are bald....
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)

[Army Air Corps]

I thought that Thunderbird was the word...

[ckilmer]

fire away. the questions are I believe ... are the ratios correct for the known period of life on earth. that is does complexity or whatever increase at the rate the author says it increases.

also why would it not start at zero complexity or whatever x billion years ago on earth.

[SpinnerWebb]

Word up! It’s the code word.

[blam]

I'm a retired chip maker....I lived Moore's law. Even met him once.

Anyway, I liked this article. Hope you all like it too.

The IceCube Neutrino Detector At The South Pole Hits Paydirt

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[LibWhacker]

that is does complexity or whatever increase at the rate the author says it increases

It's not my area, but I'd bet the farm it does, IF they restrict it to the time period for which they actually have data. This is the area of their expertise and they've spent decades studying it.

But there is something that bothers me about it; namely, as I said, they've extrapolated their results well outside the time period for which they have data. Any beginning stat student will tell you that's a very risky thing to do. You cannot say that just because your regression analysis gives you a nice straight-line fit through your data that it continues that way for BILLIONS of years prior to where your data kicks in - or kicks off. In fact, it's almost nuts to assume that that it does. Especially when the period for which you're making the claim equals or exceeds the length of time for which you actually have data to support it. However, they are experts in this field. Maybe they have good reasons, of which I am TOTALLY unaware. But I'd never do it myself.

also why would it not start at zero complexity or whatever x billion years ago on earth

Yes, good point. I'm not sure how they define complexity. Maybe it's because the precursors of life exist in interstellar space and the Earth must have benefited from their presence? I don't know.

[LibWhacker]

Maybe you've seen this Mark Twain quote...

The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . .

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

[LibWhacker]

I remember reading about it at the time, but yours was a much better article, thx!

[blam]

"I remember reading about it at the time, but yours was a much better article, thx! "

Articles like that remind me of my/our insignifance.

Here we have this little particle travelling at 186,000 miles per second for 4 billion years.....how far away is that?
(Don't say 4 billion light years, ahem)

[ApplegateRanch]

What strikes me right away is that the earth comes along and it doesn’t do anything to the graph,

Ditto for The Great Oxygen Catastrophe, when photosynthesis destroyed the then prevailing atmosphere. Isn't an oxygen based system more energy efficient than an anaerobic methane based system? Wouldn't that accelerate the rate?

Also, if the doubling time of complexity has reached about every 20 years where are all the newly advanced life forms & super-duper supermen?

[LibWhacker]

Isn't an oxygen based system more energy efficient than an anaerobic methane based system? Wouldn't that accelerate the rate?

That's an interesting question. I have no idea. Does genome size in energy efficient systems grow more rapidly than in less efficient systems? Unfortunately, my knowledge of biology, genetics, etc., is just about zero and never increases!

Also, if the doubling time of complexity has reached about every 20 years where are all the newly advanced life forms & super-duper supermen?

Another good question. I've been wondering the same thing. I mean, has the size of the human genome doubled in the last 20 years, quadrupled in the last 40 and octupled since I was a child? Are kids today eight times smarter than my generation? I don't think soooooo. Otherwise, holy smokes: My greatgrandmother, who was born in 1860, and whose knee I can remember sitting on, must've been a Neanderthal!

[SunkenCiv]

well, that bitch.

[ApplegateRanch]

Does genome size in energy efficient systems grow more rapidly than in less efficient systems?

Not certain about that, but I do know that aerobic life exploded after the Event. I would make a wild guess that as life diversified, moving into brand new territories, it also increased in genome size. I could be wrong about this, but I believe that the surviving anaerobics pretty much stagnated, right down to the present: mainly bacteria, with a few other primitives.

In the intervening time since posting, I did some checking, and the anaerobic energy pathways are less than 10% as efficient as aerobic metabolisms at producing cellular energy.

[SunkenCiv]

Development of more complexity means (ahem) a slowing of change to a crawl (because even a small change can be fatal to the organism).

[ApplegateRanch]

Ah; thank you. That puts it into focus.

[LibWhacker]

Yes, makes sense, ty. I wonder if a species could ever reach such a level of genomic complexity, that any change, or almost any change, would be detrimental, and thus evolution stop for that creature, until such time as the niche he occupies changes. I’m thinking of animals like the crocodile and the cockroach, etc., which have been around, unchanged I believe, since the time of the dinosaurs, or at least for a very long time.

Sobering, lest we get the idea this supposed exponential doubling of our own complexity every 20 years means we’re headed for perfection. Complexity does not equal perfection. It’s only “perfection” relative to your own disgusting little niche. Someone needs to tell these big-headed cockroaches that fact! Which is probably another reason we should head for the stars; if our niche has us locked in, we have to open it up.

[AnalogReigns]

Without God’s creating Word, it would have taken more than a hundred trillion years to have evolved the Universe and everything on the Earth.

Another word for "Word" or "Logos" is "Law" or "Order" or "Purpose." Since the Universe began and expanded following a certain order...Word must of been in the beginning, before any creation.