[AareyBaba]

Yet, there is only one form of life on earth exhibiting cellular metabolism and DNA/RNA replication. That original life form formed as soon as the earth became suitable for life. In the 3+ billion years since, there has been no new life form created that we know of despite the ongoing unfathomable computations.

[nilkn]

That is not unexpected. There are three forms worth considering, actually: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. The first two share DNA/RNA replication, but they operate in completely different ways. The third is dramatically more complex than either of the former two, yet emerged from them. Once the first two existed, they rapidly filled almost all possible niches available at that time, and there was no space for a third form to emerge (lest it be immediately consumed by the first two), unless that third form was exceptionally competitive (like eukaryotes were and are). The first two forms did emerge relatively early on. The third form, representing one of the most stunning advances in the history of life on Earth, took over two billion years of 10^35+ ops/second of continuous computation to emerge. In terms of total compute, that's about 10^25 greater than today's largest known frontier training run. After that point, evolutionary selection pressure began operating at higher levels of abstraction, selecting for complex multicellular morphological form and later on intelligence, culture, and beyond, over several additional billion years, while bactera and archaea continued to consume all available microscopic niches.

Beyond that, life itself modified the environment that produced the original process of abiogenesis. The early Earth featured a carbon-rich acidic ocean. After life emerged, metabolism began altering the planet’s redox chemistry, consuming available chemical free energy, transforming atmospheric and ocean composition, and eventually oxygenating the surface environment. In other words, the machinery that produced life was not left running in the same state. This is why I called it a self-modifying search engine -- search accelerants operate by changing the search landscape that the engine operates over.

[v64]

On 1 February 1871 Charles Darwin wrote about these publications to Joseph Hooker, and set out his own speculation that the original spark of life may have been in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed". Darwin explained that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_little_pond

[mncharity]

"There's strikingly little agricultural innovation in this corner of France" they mused... as the ground shook from tanks and shrapnel bursts.

A glass of sea water seems so peaceful... with its turbulent combat hellscape of voracious protists and viral shrapnel, where you're lucky to make it through a day without being eaten or lysed.

[jfarlow]

Network effects + energetic fficiencies. On an energy landscape that includes integration over very short and very long lifetimes, the thalweg of utility/energy rests right about where the current codon optimizations are. And any schemes that deviate don't get to share in the others' bounty. Reusing your foods' effort saves a lot, metabolically.

[hanjeanwat]

Or, at least, our form of life outcompeted all others out there. We don’t actually know that life only started the one time.

[ceejayoz]

Well, yeah. Starting from absolute scratch is a lot harder than adapting something that already exists to new conditions.

[nlitened]

As I understand, earlier forms of life used RNAs as building blocks (instead of proteins encoded in DNA->RNA), so protein-based life _was_ a completely different form of life.

Some of the oldest replication machinery in our cells still uses the good old rusty RNA building blocks at its core (however nowadays they're propped up with proteins), and the newer machinery is almost entirely "high tech" proteins.

So you could say that in the billions of years, entirely new life forms were created, and they just completely displaced the older, less effecient ones. Probably pure-RNA life forms were not even the first ones, and they completely displaced even more primitive prior biotechnology when they appeared.

[tardedmeme]

This is, at this point in time, still a hypothesis.

[Shitty-kitty]

Any "new life" has 0 chance in the crowded, highly competitive ecosystem.

[fragmede]

Is that still the case with the discovery extremophiles that exist on chemical vents deep under the ocean and far away from the sun? Or rather, how sure are we that they're the same form?

[myrmidon]

Yes. All known life shares an (assumed) last common universal ancestor (LUCA, presumed extinct), and there is significant evidence pointing that way.

We can infer properties and function by looking at genes shared between archea and bacteria that most likely came from such an ancestor; this paints a picture of a DNA-based anaerobic thermophile (think hydrothermal vents) with a membrane and simple anti-virus defenses (CAS).

[IsTom]

If there were more they could have been outcompeted early.