Betül Kaçar

Yes, and it may all come down to a few innovations that happened at the molecular level that may or may not be inevitable.

So all these molecular tricks may have enabled the sort of mere existence of whatever you are able to define as familiar to yourself.

Science is answering these questions.

I mean, we are limited to going back to the beginning in our ways, right?

So we rely on biology.

It's just overwritten.

You're talking about four billion-year-old records that is ever-changing.

That, again, makes it beautiful, but also makes it difficult.

It's not tractable.

Geology has...

To some degree, it has a record of a more static frozen state record that is embedded.

on itself, on the surface of this planet, if we can find them.

And that's the key, that most of these recorded remnants are, if we are lucky, we find them.

They are not naturally selected.

They are found.

They need to be found for us to read them.

So we work with a very handful set of samples, especially when we talk about the deep past,

planet with no oxygen when we passed the great oxidation event threshold that was about 2.5 billion years.

So the earliest life is even harder.

You are trying to write the story of life based on a handful of rocks and what is recorded on them.