The philosophy may be a grim calculation of humanity's fate. Moreover, the findings described that the search for interplanetary life forms will be more complex than we expected, as it appears from a study made by a group of academics from the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle led by Michael Kipp.
"The recognition of an interval in Earth's distant past that may have had oxygen levels, but far different biological inhabitants, could mean that the remote detection of an oxygen-rich world is not necessarily proof of a complex biosphere," Michael Kipp said as quoted by a press release on the UW's website.
Earth is thought to have begun to progress its modern, oxygen-rich atmosphere as lately as 800 million years ago. This is unevenly when biologically complex, oxygen-breathing creatures first appear in the fossil record, leading many to recommend that animal life was made conceivable by the rise in atmospheric oxygen.
Lomagundi Event: "The Oxygen Catastrophe"
But then it briefly and strangely gained an oxygen-rich atmosphere as the result of supposed Lomagundi Event, sometimes denoted to as the 'oxygen catastrophe' or 'great oxidation,' when the oxygen level stretched a high peak in the ocean between 2.3 and 2.1 billion years ago, but then throw down again for some inexplicable reason.
This Lomagundi Event could have provided a brief opportunity for compound, animal-like creatures to evolve billions of years before our ancestors appeared on the planet, but became extinct when oxygen was gone again, which might be a grim prediction of humanity's fate.
In a proposal to get a better idea of the oxygen levels during the Lomagundi Event, the scientists Kipp plans to analyze selenium in rocks formed on the ocean floor during the recess when the event occurred.
Selenium is released when rocks on land erode in the presence of oxygen and are metabolized by microbes in the ocean. Its large quantity in Lomagundi rocks hints that the amount of organic carbon buried in the deep ocean suddenly spiked, the team wrote in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
Questions On The Existence Of Such "Weird" Animal Life
So far, however, it seems there was little response: although there are hints that life became more compound during the Lomagundi Event, there is no convincing evidence. For now, the only indication we have is that large colonial organisms - or bacteria - were present.
"But that doesn't mean that those animals didn't exist," says Kipp. "With paleontology, it's difficult to argue that presence of evidence is evidence of absence," Kipp told the journal New Scientist.
"The take-home message is that the oxygen level was high and sufficient to support eukaryotic life and, by some opinions, maybe even animal life," Timothy Lyons at the University of California Riverside, who collaborated with the research team, explained.
