The Oldest Life

There is an area of Western Australia so forbidding that only the best miners and scientists go there. The miners are there for the usual reasons. The scientists go to dig for some of the oldest rocks known on earth.  The rocks are called “Stormatolites“, and are interesting precisely because of their age. In 1980, a surprising announcement was made. The rocks contained fossilized remains of life that existed about 3.5 billion years ago…that is a billion years before any other known life.

Moreover, these rocks contained at least five different life forms. The fossils were tiny, to be sure. Most of the forms were elongated, or strand like and the cells lacked any sign of a nucleus, as in bacteria today. Furthermore, the organisms probably lived under a thin layer of warm water and since they used carbon dioxide, they were probably photosynthetic. It appeared that scientists had found one of the earth’s earliest pond scums.

The oldest known rocks on earth are 3.8 billion years old, and some scientists think that they may contain evidence of life also. If this is so, since the earth is estimated to be only some 4.5 billion years old, life may have appeared very suddenly after the earth’s surface cooled. According to some scientists, this means that there is an increased likelihood of life appearing wherever physical conditions permit. This, in turn suggests to some that there is greater likelihood that life has appeared on other planets in the vast, far-flung universe.

Do you think so?