Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life’s early emergence on Earth
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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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An arbitrarily low abiogenesis rate cannot be robustly excluded because the chance probability tab/t⊕ ~ 0.1 is not negligible assuming a constant abiogenesis rate.
“but an arbitrarily low rate cannot be robustly excluded25–27 because the chance probability tab∕t⊕ ~ 0.1 is not negligible assuming a constant abiogenesis rate, where tab is the time of abiogenesis elapsed from the birth of Earth28, and t⊕ the present age of Earth.”
From Emergence of life in an inflationary universe (2020) · cites this paper as [26]
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- Authors
- Spiegel, D. S., & Turner, E. L.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (JP)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2011-12-22
- Volume
- 109
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 395-400
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC3258618
- OpenAlex
- W1993168013
- Cited by
- 132
- References
- 37
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 32 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 1.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Origins and Evolution of Life
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution
- Keywords
- origin of life, prior distributions, posterior probability, astrobiology, early Earth conditions
- MeSH terms
- Origin of Life, Bayes Theorem, Computer Simulation, Models, Theoretical, Earth, Planet, Exobiology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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