Comment on the paper “Fast tidal cycling and the origin of life” by Richard Lathe

We show that the fast tidal cycling postulated by Lathe [Lathe, R., 2004. Icarus 168, 18–22] is not a plausible mechanism to explain the origin of life on Earth about 3.9 Ga ago. The value of LOD at this remote epoch was probably comprised between 15 to 17 h, and the Earth–Moon distance was only about 20% smaller than nowadays, implying that the tidal frequencies and amplitudes were not so dramatically different from the present ones as stated in Latheʹs paper.