Moore’s Law predicts life originated billions of years before Earth

A new study co-authored by a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health concludes that life originated elsewhere in the Universe around 9.8 billion years ago - roughly five-billion years before the Earth was even formed. But how did the study arrive at this conclusion, and does it make any sense?

Life Before Earth

The study, conducted by NIH geneticist Alexei Sharov and theoretical biologist Richard Gordon, operates on a number of assumptions, but here’s the big one: life adheres to something resembling Moore’s Law, increasing in complexity over time at an ever-accelerating rate. By tracing the thread of genetic complexity back in time, the researchers argue, one can estimate when life originated

Moore’s Law, specifically, states that computer performance will double every 18 months, giving rise to an exponential increase in technological complexity. This not only enables us to speculate about the capabilities of future tech, it also allows us to track computer performance back through time and arrive at when that technology first began. In the case of Moore’s Law’s application to the exponential increase of transistors on integrated circuits, this corresponds to the 1960s, when said number was… well… zero.

In a paper recently posted to the preprint database arXiv, Sharov and Gordon suggest that the origin of life can be estimated by examining genetic complexity through the lens of Moore’s Law and backtracking to some point of temporal origin. By tracing the course of evolution over the last several eons - beginning with single-celled organisms and working up through increasingly complex species like fish and mammals - the researchers ultimately conclude that genome complexity has increased exponentially by doubling, not every 18 months as seen with Moore’s Law, but every 376-million years.

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