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The new life may have spread very rapidly and ended the conditions that abiogenesis required, in a sense it had a massive "leg up" on the "evolution" of non-liv
by throwaway2048 7y ago
The new life may have spread very rapidly and ended the conditions that abiogenesis required, in a sense it had a massive "leg up" on the "evolution" of non-living compounds, and we already know that species that get out competed are quickly driven to extinction.
Consider for example that abiogenesis is probably impossible in an atmosphere containing oxygen, because everything gets oxidized too fast, although free oxygen in the air happened quite a long time after life arose.
To abiogenicly form long chain carbons you need a free oxygenless reducing environment, oxygen from the new microbes could have easily poisoned all the viable sites for abiogenesis.