And her father was a science teacher!

They've got to have more honesty, integrity and loyalty than the godforsaken KGOP republicans.

before 4.0 billion the Earth was a molten hell hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean

Such an early appearance of life leads me to suspect panspermia - the hypothesis that life arrived here via meteorites. I also suspect that if this hypothesis is correct, the asteroids were martian.

so this is 800 million years after that - not really "as soon as possible", though there are claims for indirect signs of life well before this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39117523

beginning of something as complex as even the simplest life seems remarkable to me. I'm an educated scientist though not a biologist. I am unable to believe that life started by random or even selected random chance. I'm not claiming to know that the answer. I'm just saying we don't know and we shouldn't delude ourselves that we do. At least panspermia buys me a few more billion years and much more complexity.

patience to do this slow, detailed work.


.......In preparation for SIMS analysis, the team needed to painstakingly grind the original sample down as slowly as possible to expose the delicate fossils themselves—all suspended at different levels within the rock and encased in a hard layer of quartz—without actually destroying them. Spicuzza describes making countless trips up and down the stairs in the department as geoscience technician Brian Hess ground and polished each microfossil in the sample, one micrometer at a time.

Each microfossil is about 10 micrometers wide; eight of them could fit along the width of a human hair.

Valley and Schopf are part of the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium, funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which exists to study and understand the origins, the future and the nature of life on Earth and throughout the universe.

Studies such as this one, Schopf says, indicate life could be common throughout the universe. But importantly, here on Earth, because several different types of microbes were shown to be already present by 3.5 billion years ago, it tells us that "life had to have begun substantially earlier—nobody knows how much earlier—and confirms it is not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms," says Schopf.....................


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-oldest-fossils-life-earth-began.html#jCp