If a life form copies itself and the copies do the same, then the total number will keep doubling at regular intervals until the population size bumps up against resource limitations or other problems. Repeated doubling soon produces huge numbers: if you start with one and double just three hundred times, you get a quantity exceeding the number of particles in our Universe. This means that not long after the first primitive life form appeared, huge quantities of matter had come alive. Sometimes the copying wasn’t perfect, so soon there were many different life forms trying to copy themselves,
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