Was she 800 million years old?

[Ninurta]

800 million years ago, the land on Earth was barren, devoid of any life at all. All of Earth's life at the time was in the oceans. It wasn't until around 550 to 540 million years ago that life migrated from the oceans and puddles onto dry land starting with plants (see "Rhynie chert" for the very first land plants) and graduating to insects and later amphibians. This means that the Princess, if 800 million years old, had to come from somewhere other than Earth, which is not entirely impossible.

Thanks (greatly) for your personal observations.  You're a brilliant man.

Don't confuse education with intelligence. I know some stuff, but that doesn't mean I'm very bright.

Some folks believe the Earth is ~4.5B years old.  It's hard to imagine when 'life' might have cooked itself up.  Hard to imagine what caused life to 'happen'.  Might have happened more than once.

The last estimates I heard placed the Earth at 4.6B years old, and the universe allegedly at 13.8B years. The oldest fossil evidence is 3.7 to 3.9B years old on Earth, meaning life allegedly started about 800 million years after Earth's formation, or just as soon as it cooled down enough to support life.

In 1993 or so, I took a course in "The Origin and Evolution of Life" at the University of North Carolina. It was a fascinating course, much heavier on the evolution aspect than the origin aspect, mostly because no one has an explanation for the origins of life. Lots of theoretical constructs, but nothing replicable or falsifiable (i.e - they are all unprovable) - they can't use any of them to "create" life yet - and so no real science. The most fascinating Idea I came across in that class was the notion that biological molecules accidentally and randomly organized themselves along and adhering to the crystalline structure of certain clays, and then began to replicate as DNA does - i.e. just became "life". Fascinating, but still to this day unproveable, so no one in the scientific community really knows how it began. I think they never will. I don't think it's a phenomema that is explainable by science as we currently know science.

ALL notions of the origin of life, both religious AND scientific, boil down to the sentence "some stuff happened, and then... magic". Science has not been able to improve on that so far.

Just imagine if the Earth had been around for 16B years, and it was just the moon's impact that reset the clock to 4.5B years ...  Saw a really impressive video dissertation of that a good while back.  Erased anything definitive I had ever been taught.  No?

Well, I don't think that is a likely scenario, simply because the Earth - or any other planet - cannot have existed since the beginning of the universe. You see, all "metals" (all elements heavier than hydrogen) did not exist in the beginning. They are all formed in the cores of stars as the stars generate energy, as by products of the stellar fusion process. This means that, at least until some time after the first generation of stars died and exploded, to release those metals into the universe, there was no material to form planets out of.

As subsequent generations of stars live and die, more metals are released into the universe, making planet formation possible, and eventually more likely. That is one of the reasons that Earth didn't form until 9B years or so after the universe did. The universe had just not yet made enough raw material to make it out of. Thee are likely planets out thee older than the Earth, and most of them will be poorer in resources. A billion years from now, there will even be more planets, and a higher number of them will be richer in resources than Earth is.

In another 4.5 B years or so, our sun will swell and explode, contributing it's products to the raw material store to make new planets out of. It will also vaporize Earth and all the other planets, recycling the raw materials used to produce them 4.6 billion years ago back into the universe so that eventually they will contribute to the formation of as yet unheard of planets.

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