"TomHendricks474"  wrote in message
news:civ2dh$34m$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> I was reading 'Who Goes There?' by Edelson
> and he wrote this line, "...life established,
> itself on this planet with remarkable speed..."
>
> That suggested two things to me:
>
> 1. It was probably easy to do (and not the fluke
> chance event that many scenarios depend upon)

I rather hope that you're right, but remember that fluke events are bound to
happen over hundreds of millions of years (a SWAG).

> 2. It depended on conditions that were there
> earlier on rather than later.

Re your "rather than later"...   once life took hold, there's a chance that
later tries might have been thwarted (albeit a small chance, methinks).

> This window of opportunity is
> due IMO because only the early earth was hot
> enough to support and promote the chemistry
> needed to lead to life.
> If not then life would have been delayed until
> the earth cooled  with the timeline being
> much much shorter.
> This helps supports the idea of the origin in the
> early hotter era of earth's development.

I'm not clear of the earth's temperature at the OOL timeline but thought it
was hotter (and hence this "fact" is not in need of help(?).)

> Oh and on a side note: Some talk of silicon life
> as a possibility - with silicon replacing carbon.
> Yet the earth has more silicon than carbon -
> (when it combines with oxygen we get the basic
> ingredient of sand silicon dioxide).
> If it could work, it should have worked here as
> well as anywhere else. And silicon life did not
> work on earth - carbon life did.
>
> Comment?

Is there talk of other possibilities?  Are most elements/compounds ruled
out?  Regards, Brett Aubrey.

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
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