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Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after theyoung planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-basedorganisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been takenas evidence that the probability of abiogenesis is high, if starting fromyoung-Earth-like conditions. We revisit this argument quantitatively in aBayesian statistical framework. By constructing a simple model of theprobability of abiogenesis, we calculate a Bayesian estimate of its posteriorprobability, given the data that life emerged fairly early in Earth's historyand that, billions of years later, curious creatures noted this fact andconsidered its implications. We find that, given only this very limitedempirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesisprobability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posteriorprobability. Although terrestrial life's early emergence provides evidence thatlife might be common in the Universe if early-Earth-like conditions are, theevidence is inconclusive and indeed is consistent with an arbitrarily lowintrinsic probability of abiogenesis for plausible uninformative priors.Finding a single case of life arising independently of our lineage (on Earth,elsewhere in the Solar System, or on an extrasolar planet) would provide muchstronger evidence that abiogenesis is not extremely rare in the Universe.

Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life's early emergence on Earth