Thank you for the article. Very fascinating!

That's extremely early. That means life existed on Earth almost as soon as it possible could have existed. (Actually, a bit before in the time scale of the previous geological time models!)

This is extremely interesting. Where did this life come from? Did it develop so quickly on the ancient Earth?

My personal view is that it did not. I suspect the galaxy is teaming with life and transpermia is the source of life on Earth. Perhaps material from interstellar sources. I like this hypothesis because it widens the scientifically possible environments in which life originally started.

I like Quanta Magazine. This is an interesting article: thanks for sharing!

We assume that homo sapiens are the only sentient race to inhabit the earth. This is primarily based on our anthropomorphic time concept of where we are in the history of earth, seemingly incapable of understand that similar evolutionary evolution may have occurred in the past millions of years.
If interested in this subject look up the archaeology of the Builder Race in Antarctica.

Alrighty...

Well whats a few billion years out amongst friends. Life did start at some point ,can anyone comprehend a million years let alone a billion?

I wonder if some distant future alien would visit this planet and be able to determine when (so called) intelligent life went extinct?

There is so much more to be learned about our planet and the solar system we inhabit.

Nice! Thanks for sharing. It will be interesting to see how things develop.

The diverse conditions in which life can be found never ceseases to amaze me. I'm interested to see how this develops further down the road.

Good stuff.