Really, really weird that the article doesn't even mention nitrogen, nostoc or heterocysts. I'm not sure you can have a conversation about the great oxygen holocaust without at least bringing up one of the primary reasons we know "something" about the conditions before the event, specifically that there are still bacteria around today who are putting out a pretty significant amount of effort to create anoxygenic environments specifically for nitrogen fixation; that nitrogen as a terminal electron receptor basically 'cant happen' in the presence of oxygen.

Its just weird to not discuss the evolutionary lineage that still uses pre-oxygenation event hardware (with some extreme bug fixes to deal with oxygen) to fix nitrogen.

Effectively, we've been out-competed in all the low complexity niche; life adds complexity to take advantage of novel niche where there is less competition.

You also might be able to get a 'compression' sample of space in the same manner, by running an auto-encoder in training mode. Rather than trying to do some kind of hack directly, it collects the same data you mentioned, but rather, is just training on the data in an auto-encoding compression framework. Then it can 'hand off' the compressed models weights, which hypothetically, can be queried or used to simulate the environment. Obviously, there is a lot more to this, but its an interesting idea.

Source?

Have you ever been in a car?