This is very interesting and readable paper with astonishing consequences. Here's summary: - Genetic complexity roughly increases 10X every billion year. - Th

This is very interesting and readable paper with astonishing consequences. Here's summary: - Genetic complexity roughly increases 10X every billion year. - This implies life started about 9 billion years ago. - Adjusting for potential hyperexponential effects, origin of life could close to start of universe itself. - It took 5 billion years to get to the complexity of bacteria. - Life had started long before Earth came in existence but it was very primitive (aka panspermia). - If you follow this theory it means, there were no intelligent species in universe that had existed before us. This means, Earth wasn't seeded by another intelligent aliens. There are some sweeping propositions that Kurzweil is wrong on whole singularity concept. There is also a mention that Drake's equation is likely wrong to calculate number of civilizations in galaxy based on this theory. In a way, I think this paper actually points to many more possible places with intelligent life because it proposes primitive life had been floating in universe long before and planets like Earth got seeded with them. Unless we assume Earth as having the best possible conditions in entire galaxy, this means intelligent life has to exist somewhere else in large enough sample of planets. The only problem is that this life isn't going to be far more super superior (or more accurately exceed us in genetic complexity).