The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth’s history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.
It suggests that “the filter” lies ahead of us rather than behind us. The difficulties of producing multi-cellular organisms have been one of the main responses to the Fermi Paradox (“where are they?”). If it’s not so hard after all, there must be some other obstacle to lots of self-reproducing von Neumann probes.
The link is here. Speaking of bad news, here is a bad news argument about Chinese real estate.