Early Life and Extinction Events (Off-topic)

[M Murphy <4mjmu@home.com>]

Off topic but nice, Stanford Geophysicist Norman Sleep argues that the
early Earth, between 4.5 and 3.8 billion years ago, might have seen the
repeated spread on life across the Earth's surface, followed by repeated
extinction events caused by asteroid collisions. One strand of evidence
is that "two of the three major branches of life that exist on Earth
today- Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya - began with organisms that were
designed to live in extremely hot environments, the kinds that would
have existed for millions of years after the impact of a large
asteroid."  Full story is at:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/12/011217082959.htm


Cheers,

M.J.Murphy

`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein