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Iron is an essential part of life and is needed to grow and thrive. The amount of iron in the Earth's rocky mantle was set by the conditions under which the planet formed and went on to have major ramifications for how life developed. Scientists at the University of Oxford have discovered the likely mechanisms by which iron influenced the development of complex life forms, which can be used to understand how likely advanced life forms are on other planets. The work was published in a journal.
Jon Wade is an Associate Professor of Planetary Materials at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford. Life is unlikely on the rocky portion of the planet because of the lack of iron. Mars and water may be difficult to keep on the surface for times relevant to the evolution of complex life.
Iron conditions on Earth would have been ideal to retain water. Iron would be readily available to give life forms a boost in development. The "Great Oxygenation Event" began about 2.4 billion years ago. An increase in oxygen caused iron to become insoluble. There was less iron available in the sea water.
Hal Drakesmith, Professor of Iron Biology at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, is one of the authors. "For example, infections, symbiosis and multicellularity are behaviors that enable life to more efficiently capture and utilize this scarce but vital nutrient." It would have made early life forms even more complex by adopting such characteristics.
The need for iron as a driver for evolution may be rare or random. Implications for how likely complex life forms are on other planets have arisen from this.
Prof Drakesmith says that it is not known how common intelligent life is. The conditions to support the initiation of simple life-forms are not enough to ensure the evolution of complex life-forms. For example, how life on Earth needed to find a new way to access iron may need further selection. The likelihood of intelligent life may be low because of temporal changes at planetary scale.
Knowing how important iron is in the development of life may help in the search for suitable planets that could develop life forms. It may be possible to narrow the search for exo-planets capable of supporting life by assessing the amount of iron in the mantle.
The Temporal variation of planetary iron is a driver of evolution. There is a book titled "10.1073/pnas.
The National Academy of Sciences has a journal.
The possibility of life on other planets was retrieved from the news on December 6th, 2021.
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