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Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window,but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts toinfer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated bythe selection effect that if the evolution of intelligence is a slow process,then life's early start may simply be a prerequisite to our existence, ratherthan useful evidence for optimism. In this work, we interpret the chronology ofthese two events in a Bayesian framework, extending upon previous work byconsidering that the evolutionary timescale is itself an unknown that needs tobe jointly inferred, rather than fiducially set. We further adopt an objectiveBayesian approach, such that our results would be agreed upon even by thoseusing wildly different priors for the rates of abiogenesis and evolution -common points of contention for this problem. It is then shown that theearliest microfossil evidence for life indicates that the rate of abiogenesisis at least 2.8 times more likely to be a typically rapid process, rather thana slow one. This modest limiting Bayes factor rises to 8.7 if we accept themore disputed evidence of C13 depleted zircon deposits (Bell et al. 2015). Forintelligence evolution, it is found that a rare-intelligence scenario isslightly favored at 3:2 betting odds. Thus, if we re-ran Earth's clock, oneshould statistically favor life to frequently re-emerge, but intelligence maynot be as inevitable.

An Objective Bayesian Analysis of Life's Early Start and Our Late Arrival