  An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times
suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started
from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to
a nucleotide. The genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of
non-redundant functional nucleotides, is expected to have grown exponentially
due to several positive feedback factors: gene cooperation, duplication of
genes with their subsequent specialization, and emergence of novel functional
niches associated with existing genes. Linear regression of genetic complexity
on a log scale extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the
origin of life 9.7 billion years ago. This cosmic time scale for the evolution
of life has important consequences: life took ca. 5 billion years to reach the
complexity of bacteria; the environments in which life originated and evolved
to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on
Earth; there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of
Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by
intelligent aliens; Earth was seeded by panspermia; experimental replication of
the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare
events; and the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in
the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in
our universe. Evolution of advanced organisms has accelerated via development
of additional information-processing systems: epigenetic memory, primitive
mind, multicellular brain, language, books, computers, and Internet. As a
result the doubling time of complexity has reached ca. 20 years. Finally, we
discuss the issue of the predicted technological singularity and give a
biosemiotics perspective on the increase of complexity.
