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ppauper
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Re: Fossils

October 17th, 2018, 8:27 pm

 
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bearish
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Re: Fossils

October 17th, 2018, 11:18 pm

If the claim is that they're more than about 6,000 years old, whatever they are, that's fake research!
 
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Alan
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Re: Fossils

October 18th, 2018, 3:40 am

So, that leaves the earliest signs of life at 3.43 billion years ago. Then, we have this:
The Earth was formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Until 3.8 billion years ago it was a completely inhospitable environment with the surface being mainly molten lava. The Earth eventually cooled enough for its crust to form. Land masses could then exist and, when it was cold enough to rain, the oceans formed.  Around this time the atmosphere was predominantly consisted of methane (CH4) and ammonia (NH3), two extremely important greenhouse gases, thus their radiative forcing kept the Earth’s atmosphere warm and toasty!
Source

So, the best estimates are that it took less than 500 million years for life to form after it 'could'. If correct, one would expect any (most?) Earth-like planets to have some life. If we don't see that, another Fermi "where is everybody"? type puzzle. If we do (my bet), I'll also bet we get enough clues to (finally!) understand it, enough to create some primitive life ourselves in the laboratory from non-life.   

Then, creationism gets pushed back to having to argue, 'well, isn't it a miracle that the universe was engineered to work this way?' Leaving, at most, the scenario for believing Jews or Christians: God cooled his heels from the big bang to the age of the patriarchs, whispered to them for a few generations, revealed some laws, performed some miracles, incarnated either 0 or 1 time, and then made his exit from our neck of the woods.