Re: Earth's Early Atmosphere
Posted by DA Morgan on Jan 12, 2002 at 14:47
ava38.drizzle.com (216.162.193.101)Re: Earth's Early Atmosphere (Mike Kremer)
I don't think anyone today in the sciences would dispute that the seeds for life came from space.
We know, for a fact, that meteors and the dust clouds from which stars and planets form contain amino acids, carbon dioxide, cyanides, ammonia, soluble minerals, and hundreds of other biologically active molecules.
And as Stephen Hawking has said ... if something can happen, no matter how unlikely, given enough time it is inevitable. If life started 3 billion years ago ... and the earth is about 4.7 billion years old ... that leaves 1.7 billion years for the inevitable to happen. That's about 5,361,120,000,000,000 seconds (if I didn't mess up the decimal) ... plenty of time. And it only needed to happen once in that much time.