Maximum number of generations, and evolution.

[Eric H]

If life started on Earth some four billion years ago, how many generations might have passed, between then and now? Could the answer be measured in tens of billions of generations?

In the spirit of searching for answers

Eric

[marwen]

Greetings Eric ! nice to see you.

erm ... That's a really interesting question. Unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge to answer it, but it's a good subject for discussion.

I see that the difficulty to figure out the number of generations resides in the variation of the generation duration through time. For example, the first generations of humans can live for 1000 year or more. But now generations are of short duration : less than 100 year.
That's only my simple reasoning.

all the best.

[Eric H]

Greetings and peace be with you marwen;

Thanks for your reply, and I guess I would answer in the same kind of way, using scriptures. But I was searching for an answer from the science community. If some kind of simple life was formed billions of years ago, a new generation might come into being in a matter of hours or days.
This would mean that life would have the opportunity to evolve, in small changes over billions of generations. I was just wondering, if anyone had put any numbers, as to how many generations there may have been?

In the spirit of searching

Eric