About four billion years ago, single-celled life emerged on this planet. It took about another two-and-a-half to three billion years for those single cells to decide to clump together into multi-cellular organisms.
We think of evolutionary processes as plodding and glacial, taking aeons. Yet we are starting to learn just how incredibly fast evolution can occur given the right circumstances to create selection pressure.
When faced with a predator, single-celled organisms in a lab learned to coalesce into multi-celled organisms for mutual protection, in less than a single year.
This means that complex life is much, much more likely to exist in abundance throughout our universe. It also casts doubt on one answer to the Fermi Paradox (of why we haven't found any aliens yet), that Earth is early to the party.
Galactic civilisations would have had plenty of time to rise and fall in our very neighbourhood, billions of years ago.
Wow, one year to a new organism. I had no idea that was even possible. Although now that I think about it, stress and fear can often bring about dramatic changes. Thanks for the post @honeybee.
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Folks that consider the long interregnum between the advent of life and the appearance of complex multicellular organisms slow aren't aware of the complexity of living things, and just how much was going on in that time.
The mechanism of death, for example, had to evolve to speed up evolution.
Thanks!
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