ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life's early emergence on Earth.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Other Earths, Gaian bottlenecks and Darwinized Gaias.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- A reassessment of the "hard-steps" model for the evolution of intelligent life.Science advances · 2025Review
- Formulation and resolutions of the red sky paradox.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare.Astrobiology · 2021Article
- Quantifying the information impact of future searches for exoplanetary biosignatures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- An objective Bayesian analysis of life's early start and our late arrival.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Emergence of life in an inflationary universe.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Bayesian approach to SETI.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Exoplanet Biosignatures: Future Directions.Astrobiology · 2018Review
- Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Framework for Their Assessment.Astrobiology · 2018Review
- Atmospheric escape from the TRAPPIST-1 planets and implications for habitability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- A Statistical Approach to Illustrate the Challenge of Astrobiology for Public Outreach.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2017Article
- Enhanced interplanetary panspermia in the TRAPPIST-1 system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Signal coverage approach to the detection probability of hypothetical extraterrestrial emitters in the Milky Way.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Quantifying the origins of life on a planetary scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Evolvability Is an Evolved Ability: The Coding Concept as the Arch-Unit of Natural Selection.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2016Article
- Structure of exoplanets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Review
- Some inconvenient truths about biosignatures involving two chemical species on Earth-like exoplanets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting from young Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in a bayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of the probability of abiogenesis, we calculate a bayesian estimate of its posterior probability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth's history and that, billions of years later, curious creatures noted this fact and considered its implications. We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability. Although terrestrial life's early emergence provides evidence that life might be abundant in the universe if early-Earth-like conditions are common, the evidence is inconclusive and indeed is consistent with an arbitrarily low intrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors. Finding a single case of life arising independently of our lineage (on Earth, elsewhere in the solar system, or on an extrasolar planet) would provide much stronger evidence that abiogenesis is not extremely rare in the universe.
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