FIG. 3.

Posterior distributions updated on an interval of possible timings for the origin of life and eukaryotic life. On the top, we assume abiogenesis took between 1 and 900 Myr to occur, and on the bottom we assume that abiogenesis may have taken an amount of time ranging from instantaneously to 900 Myr. Although more posterior probability mass is assigned to rates that have a high probability of intelligent life emerging (denoted in yellow), the majority of posterior mass is still on rates that are incompatible with intelligent life occurring within the habitable lifetime of Earth (denoted in blue). Color images are available online.