The Most Important Thing that Ever Happened

You can watch Eons: Life and Death in Pangea Here: https://www.pbs.org/show/eons/ or on the Free PBS App! https://www.pbs.org/pbs-app/ Sourcessss Lithopanspermia https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/could-life-hitch-a-ride-to-saturn-and-jupiter/ Mars rocks on earth https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visitors-from-the-red-planet.html (Mars rocks on Earth) Earth rocks on the moon https://eos.org/articles/apollo-may-have-found-an-earth-meteorite-on-the-moon Earth rocks on mars (probably) https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000Icar..145..391M/abstract Biological material can survive space some https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00927-5 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000Icar..145..391M/abstract Life started very early https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19355 https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/life-science/early-life-earth-animal-origins David Kipping on life’s early start and our late arrival https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1921655117 Anthropic principle stuff… https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/ Multiple abiogenesis events??? https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/DaviesetalShadow.pdf (full text) Enceledus as a habitable world https://science.nasa.gov/resource/enceladus-a-habitable-environment/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/nasa-cassini-data-reveals-building-block-for-life-in-enceladus-ocean/ The KT impact’s terrible (or very good) luck https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14199-x (Kaiho & Oshima 2017 — only ~13% of Earth's surface could have produced an extinction-level event) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15269-x (2020 — the ~60° impact angle was near the deadliest possible) If it had hit minutes later (actually 30 seconds!?!) https://www.popsci.com/dinosaur-asteroid-late/ Mitochondria https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21031 https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2022/mitochondria-origin-eukaryotes https://evolution.berkeley.edu/it-takes-teamwork-how-endosymbiosis-changed-life-on-earth/finding-our-roots/ Lost mitochondria https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27185558 Mitochondria probably only happened once. https://evolution.berkeley.edu/it-takes-teamwork-how-endosymbiosis-changed-life-on-earth/finding-our-roots/ Theia and the moon https://science.nasa.gov/moon/formation/ https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/explore/marvelMoon/background/moon-influence/ https://eos.org/articles/how-much-did-the-moon-heat-young-earth The moon stabilizing earth’s tilt important for life?? https://www.nature.com/articles/361615a0 (Yes!) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103511004064 (perhaps not so much) The Ribosome https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/ribosomes-transcription-and-translation-14120660/ RNA WORLD https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26876/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4371318/ Oxygenic photosynthesis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4755140/