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Does Moore’s Law apply to origin of life?

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File:StromatolitheAustralie25.jpeg
stromatolites, very early life form/Eekhout

What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Moore’s Law

The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore’s Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore’s Law to hold for at least another two decades. – Vangie Beal, Webopedia

Further to life being older than Earth, a kind reader draws our attention to this item in MIT Technology Review.

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Today, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and his mate Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have taken a similar to complexity and life.

These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.

That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life? More.

Of course, Moore’s Law is fuelled by intelligent design. If people can live with that fact, we might be on to something here.

Note: Some techs say Moore’s Law is dead.

See also: Life was on Earth when it first formed? Physicist Ethan Siegel: if we continue to push this limit back earlier and earlier: 4.3 billion years, 4.4 billion years, 4.45 billion years… it’s going to be harder and harder to argue that this life didn’t come to Earth already alive in some sense.

and

What we know and don’t know about the origin of life

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