The DOI matches its Crossref record; 35 of the 37 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life’s early emergence on Earth
Open accessAbstract
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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“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]
Citations
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Perryman, M. A. C. (2011) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/9781108304160 · Cited by 380
Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Framework for Their Assessment
Catling, D. C., Krissansen-Totton, J., Kiang, N. Y., Crisp, D., Robinson, T. D., DasSarma, S., Rushby, A. J., Del Genio, A., Bains, W., & Domagal-Goldman, S. (2018) · Astrobiology · doi:10.1089/ast.2017.1737 · Cited by 225
Atmospheric escape from the TRAPPIST-1 planets and implications for habitability
Dong, C., Jin, M., Lingam, M., Airapetian, V., Ma, Y., & van der Holst, B. (2017) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1708010115 · Cited by 207
Habitable Zone Lifetimes of Exoplanets around Main Sequence Stars
Rushby, A. J., Claire, M. W., Osborn, H., & Watson, A. J. (2013) · Astrobiology · doi:10.1089/ast.2012.0938 · Cited by 138
Exoplanet Biosignatures: Future Directions
Walker, S. I., Bains, W., Cronin, L., DasSarma, S., Danielache, S. O., Domagal-Goldman, S. D., Kaçar, B., Kiang, N. Y.-L., Lenardic, A., Reinhard, C. T., et al. (2018) · Astrobiology · doi:10.1089/ast.2017.1738 · Cited by 137
Metadata
- 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 › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › 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
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