[breck]

Has anyone seen a visual tree of life that starts before life on earth?

Or in other words, say at some point we discover aliens in a distance galaxy. Would we be cousins? Are there visualizations that show what that kind of family tree would look like?

I am a neophyte in this area but I'm sure there's a lot of good research out there.

[kadoban]

Without seeing what's out there I don't think any such trees would make sense to draw. There's too many possible ones, and the branches would just be "?". We could be cousins of several sorts, convergently evolved to have some similarities, be completely unrelated in any way to other life, or any of several combinations of those.

And that's just the broad strokes, trees would be the details.

It's worth noting also that even only considering life on Earth that we already know about, the "tree of life" is already kind of a broken abstraction. Consider bacteria that are able to share genetic material without an ancestor relationship for instance, or closer to home even viruses that infect humans or any other kind of mammals. They affect our genetics in ways the tree doesn't/can't capture.

[breck]

It’s true, in a way the tree of life runs in the opposite direction.

[wanderingstan]

“Panspermia” is the keyword to get you started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[breck]

Bingo!