On an outcrop of exposed volcanic and sedimentary rock on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec, researchers have discovered what may be the earliest fossilized lifeforms ever discovered. These microbial ancestors lived between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago, only 300 million years after the Earth itself formed — a blink of an eye in geologic timescales. If life developed this rapidly on Earth, it suggests that abiogenesis — the process by which non-living matter becomes a living organism — is potentially “easy” to achieve, and life in the universe may be more common than we thought.
