When researchers in Greenland announced the discovery of the oldest fossils of life ever found, the science community was obviously intrigued. The 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland are stromatolites, containing the fossilized remains of complex microbes typically found in shallow waters. They depict lifeforms far more evolutionarily advanced than what scientists thought possible at that point in Earth’s history.
But the implications of the findings went far beyond that of the confines of Earth — they affected the very future of astrobiology, or the search for extinct or extant extraterrestrial life.
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