This paper is two years old now, but still seems big news to me: Genetic complexity, roughly measured by the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides … Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago. … There was no intelligent life in our universe at the time of the origin of Earth, because the universe was 8 billion years old at that time, whereas the development of intelligent life requires ca. 10 billion years of evolution. (