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Life Could Have Evolved 15 Million Years After the Big Bang, Says Cosmologist
KentuckyFC writes "Goldilocks zones are regions around stars that are 'just right' for liquid water and for the chemistry of life as we know it. Now one cosmologist points out that the universe must have been through a Goldilocks epoch, a period in which warm, watery conditions could have existed on almost any planet in the entire cosmos. The key phenomenon here is the cosmic background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang which was blazing hot when it first formed. But as the universe expanded, the wavelength of this radiation increased, lowering its energy. Today, it is an icy 3 Kelvin. But somewhere along the way, it must have been between 273 and 300 Kelvin, just right to keep water in liquid form. According to the new calculations, this Goldilocks epoch would have occurred when the universe was about 15 million years old and would have lasted for several million years. And since the first stars had a lifespan of only 3 million years or so, that allows plenty of time for the heavy elements to have formed which are necessary for planet formation and the chemistry of life. Indeed, if live did evolve a this time, it would have predated life on Earth by about 10 billion years."
I wonder if that was long enough to produce lush gardens with apple trees.
And I could have been born smart and good looking. But that didn't happen either.
I don't think the author completely understands what the Anthropic Principle is.
So does this imply that it's plausible that life could have formed and subisuently evolved an extrmophile form that may still be roaming deep space?
His vast Noodly Appendeges still bathed the entire cosmos is a fine tomato based sauce.
That's a heck of a lot of "greats" in great great great great great..........great grandparent.
"I used to squirm to school barefooted in cosmic radiation and supernovas exploding in my protoplasm face every day!"
Table-ized A.I.
If this is true, the entire universe could have been seeded with life, or at least its precursors, almost from the very beginning.
It wouldn't have been just planets that were this warm. All the asteroids, comets, dust specs would have been this warm. If you look at evolution as time * volume, what was the volume here? Does this time * volume exceed all of Earth's history?
There's also the matter of energy. Just being warm enough to have water doesn't imply being able to run a heat pump. Don't know if chemicals are enough, or if you need a nearby sun. If you need a nearby sun, the Goldilocks epoch would be later than this calculation.
Everyone knows the Time Lords are one of the first races of the galaxy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So would this in theory have created a universe akin to fluidic space from ST:Voyager? LIke would the whole universe be composed of this? Or just clusters of matter of stars and planets like today?
Frankly i feel very stupid for asking this question and using that reference (always thought fluidic space was a dumb idea), but I admit in my non-astro-physicist mind this idea sounds compelling.
in a far away Galaxy..
This is pretty scary. One of the major unsolved problems right now is the Fermi problem- why we don't see any signs of civilizations other than our own, not just no radio transmissions but no Dyson spheres (and yes, we've looked http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm, stellar uplifting, ringworlds or the like. Whatever is blocking this is the so-called Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. Now, some of the Filter could be in our past. It may be tough for life to arise or for multicellular life to arise, etc. However, the more disturbing possibility is that it exists in our future: maybe civilizations before they can spread out manage to wipe themselves out with their technologies, such as through nuclear war, bad nanotech, engineered bioweapons, resource depletion, environmental damage, or something we haven't even thought about before.
Over the last few years, more and more evidence has suggested that a lot of the obvious filtration events in the past aren't serious filters. For example, we've found that planets are common. This is not only an example of more such evidence, but it suggests that if life got started it would have had billions years more to evolve, meaning that evolutionarily based filters will be substantially less effective. Worse, it undermines one of the easier ways to try and get around a filter, to suggest that the conditions for complex life didn't arise until recently. There are serious problems with that idea already (especially the fact that life on Earth spent hundreds of millions of years in near stasis), and this makes those problems even more severe. If this checks out, it will be strong evidence that a substantial portion of the filter is in the future. If so, it is likely that the Filter is something that is going to happen to us within the next few hundred years, since it gets harder to wipe out a civilization once they spread beyond their initial planet, and most obvious things that would do so are also more noticeable.
The problem with theories of extra-terrestrial life is: the probability of us being here is 1, regardless of the a-priori probability of life being created on this planet.
Here's a nice way to look at it.
Consider the formation of the first life-generating molecules, like DNA, or the first ribosomes. You can compare the corresponding probability (i.e., of those molecules actually forming) to the following situation. Assume you have a grid of infinite times infinite squares (our analogy of the universe). Each square is, randomly, either black or white.
In some regions of the grid, you may see certain patterns. For example, in some pieces of this universe, you will see the complete work of Shakespeare written in Helvetica 16pt. (In other regions, you may see a dithered version of our beloved goatse picture.)
Now what is the probability of a 1,000x1,000 patch at a given position to be completely black? Well, 2^1,000,000, a rather big number. Any other pattern in that 1,000x1,000 patch would have the same probability. What is the average manhattan distance between such blocks? (Left as an exercise for the reader).
If, in this thought-experiment, a molecular structure that can bootstrap life corresponds to an NxN structure on a grid, you can compute the distance between these life-generators. And you will find rather large numbers.
The lesson is of course to keep those numbers in mind the next time you expect life on some planet with seemingly earthlike properties.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
If we ever meet any life that evolved from back then we shall microbes to them as microbes are to us. A curiosity to be studied, and shelved, dissected and put on display.
Although I find it unlikely given only several million years. Those planets have to cool.
Certainly not complex life, complex life requires a hell of a lot of time
My understanding is that as of very recently there was no scientific consensus on how Earth itself got its water... or so said a Discovery Channel presentation of the history of the Earth which otherwise seemed like mainline science (molten Earth, iced Earth, evolution, etc.).
Can someone offer an overview of the current hypothesis/consensus?
But I've always figured self-replication was as common in the universe as stalagmites or simple carbon isomers. There's nothing really special about it... it just happens.
Even as recent as 165 years ago a temperature of '273 Kelvin' did not exist.
This (a goldilocks era) is a really interesting idea which seems obvious now that someone has brought it up. But it would be brief. Think of it this way, for millions of years the cosmic glow would be hot, too hot. Planets form, create magma oceans ... still too hot. Finally, the big bang glow cools to around 300K, but the Earth is likely still a magma ocean, or is still hot from trying to be in equilibrium with a hot universe plus internal heat from all those radioactives. Life aronse on Earth fairly rapidly, but it is unlikely that it took just a few million years. Even if it did arise on one of these worlds, it took billions for multicellularity to arise on Earth. After the brief goldilocks era what then? The sky would continue cooling, the worlds that were desirable places for new life would freeze, the ones that were too hot might now be suitable for life. In the end there would be little benefit. But there would still be planets around where life could start, though it might be complicated and very dangerous at this time.
Bitter and proud of it.
The real paradox is why people still think we should look for impossible things.
The reality is .... things are what we never would have dreamt of. It's not looking for the impossbility - but looking for what actually exists - and that more than likely is something we have never thought of in our puny little simian brains.
This!
That period in the history of our universe may have been warm, but I imagine that, at the time, the average hospitable planetary surface would have been pretty dark. After all, if the Goldilocks zone is what you get without having a nearby star at all, then having a star nearby would make things too hot. So, any planetary surface suitable for life to evolve on would have been a necessarily dark place.
An unfortunate consequence of this warm universe is that it will have taken longer for planetary bodies to cool down after their formation. The question is, would even a Mars-sized body have have enough time to form and cool down so that standing water could have existed on its surface during this Goldilocks era? Somehow, I doubt it.
As the background temperature cooled to below the freezing point of water, the habitable volume of the universe suddenly became restricted to the areas around stars. These early stellar Goldilocks zones will initially have been huge, but would soon become much smaller. And as they became smaller, they also became more brightly lit.
The following is nothing new, but few people want to face up to what it really means for us. The 6th Mass Extinction is well under way, and it has nothing to do with cuddly pandas and (less cuddly) tigers and rhinos disappearing. It's the microscopic life such as oceanic biota, nearly all of it unseen by most people, that's disappearing at a devastating pace like nothing that's ever happened before on this planet.
We can live without the top-end mammals that make the extinction news on the TV. We can't live without the microbiota. We are not independent of them, they keep the biosphere running and our crops producing, and without the biosphere we are no more.
The collapse of biodiversity is, on geological scales, vertically downwards, and at some point it simply hits the zero axis. It could happen even more suddenly if a tipping point is reached, because species are inter-dependent. The current decline is not the normal sort of gradually falling curve as seen in the past 5 extinctions. On the biodiversity graph, this event is an abrupt termination of all life. You can't argue with the biodiversity curve.
We don't really need more Great Filter theories. This one is not a theory, it's measured, and it's quite enough all by itself.
"There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the Universe, that we have not explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957 and they must walk there alone."
Subjectively that second would have been like billions of years to them. And could they have left traces, like manipulating the fabric of space to encourage life to form in atomic matter? Like the universe for them would have been the size of a watermelon and they'd have had energy at scales to make quasars look like a cheap eBay LED flashlight?
Mostly random stuff.
It's "3 kelvins", not "3 Kelvin". Lower case to mean the temperature unit, upper case to mean 3 copies of Lord Kelvin.
This is roughly like stating (with a straight face) that the Easter Bunny could have appeared 150 years after Santa Claus.
I don't care about ANY of your mythical "events" from history. Why the hell would I care about what one has to do with the other?
I'm sure there was plenty of Hydrogen, and probably a lot of Helium at that point, but given that life (as we know it) depends on, at very least, elements up to Sodium (Atomic Number 11), and heaver elements are the result of nucleosynthesis in the exploding cores of dying stars, even with water around, were there enough heavier elements to support life? Was there even enough Oxygen around to form water, regardless of the temperature?
we are meat, they watch our TV shows and choose to ignore us.
-42
A several million year period where life could have developed is not much time considering that it took several billion years for life on earth to evolve from simple cells to multi-cellular organisms.
So the universe once had the perfect living conditions for species 8472/
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
To locally decrease entropy (as life must) you need both an energy source and an energy sink (i.e. somewhere to send your waste heat.) I think this era of the universe would have problems with the energy sink bit. If the coldest available sink is 270K, life would need to be much hotter to be able to use it, which is likely too hot for complex organic reactions.
Having said that, a little bit after (say when the microwave background was at 200K) might have been pretty good for life. Now you only need a little help from a star and planetary atmosphere to get liquid water, so a star's Goldilocks zone should be much larger than at present.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Cosmologist argues that the Big Bang was at billions of degrees and the background radiation is barely above absolute zero. The temperature of the universe must have passed through the range at which water is liquid somewhere along the way. Therefore, Life could have evolved very early on.
Poppycock!
Life continually becomes more organized. You are a lower-entropy state than a stew of hydrogen, carbon, etc. of the same mass and at the same temperature. Simply put, the number of microstates which are alive is much much less than the number of states which are aren’t. As soon as you die, your body starts to move towards one of those more likely configurations.
Life does NOT violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics because our decrease of entropy is more than compensated for by increases in entropy elsewhere. Specifically, in the Sun.
The Sun is more than a source of light and heat. Every quanta of energy which the Earth absorbs is, on average, radiated away again. If this were not so the Earth would grow steadily and indefinitely hotter (or colder.) What the Sun DOES is provide up for a steady supply of energy with low Entropy.
The Entropy of a body is, formally, its Energy divided by its absolute temperature. In the case of radiation, “temperature” is derived from its frequency. It’s the temperature of the body which emitted it. Every day Earth absorbs energy from a high-temperature source, about 6000 degrees. High temperature means low-entropy, because temperature appears in the denominator. The energy radiates back into space at Earth-temperature, about 60 F. So the Earth is continually throwing its unwanted Entropy into the night sky,
You need both a high-temperature source and a low-temperature sink to get anything useful done. A rock on a cliff above you does no work unless there’s a valley for it to fall into.
If the entire sky “glowed” at the same temperature the planet has, then Life would be unable to maintain its low-entropy state, to evolve or, indeed, to do much of anything.
The main limitation of "Goldilocks Zone" is in the imagination. Papa Bear's porridge was the right temperature for Papa Bear. We are defining "life sustaining" as what would sustain our lives. Who would have predicted "vent and seep" communities on the ocean floor, living from heat from fissures? But those are easy... What's really hard to understand are life forms that have a civilization occur in a millisecond, or a synapse that takes a million years...
Gently reply
That the Ancients built the Star Gates. Jump Gates, on the other hand, were initially created by the First Ones.
is empty. If there are a significant number of other civilizations and a significant number of those are older than us, then we ought to have detected them as soon as we started listening
Consider:
You go to the store and by a new radio. You take it home and plug it in and switch it on. You've been listening for mere moments, and yet - you immediately hear many different stations broadcasting a wide variety of content because there are other people who are richer and more advanced than you and who had technology before you who already set up their stations and started broadcasting long before you started listening
My money's on the idea that our universe is just an incubator for new life. A nursery. Stars are heat lamps, planets are nests, etc. Eventually, technological civilizations grow out of childhood, learn enough about their surroundings to realize there's much more out there, and their tech develops enough to let them escape and join the party outside the universe, where all the other super-old civilizations are. Crazy rambling, I know, but it's a good seed for ideas.
The cosmic background radiation would have caused the entire universe to be at this temperature, but for any thermodynamically feasible process to occur you need some difference in temperature, so I'm guessing these objects capable of supporting life must have had done variance in surface temperatures, which to must be in the range supported by carbon based organic life, which imposes yet another constraint to make this equally likely as it is today
Quoting from the end of the article:
> Foremost among them will be whether there is any mechanism that could have allowed life from
> this era, if it did evolve, to have survived as the universe cooled down. And if so, whether there
> might be evidence of it today.
Seems like it would be possible if a world was in free space during the warm period and then was captured by a sun as the background radiation cooled. Yeah, the handoff would have to be pretty precisely timed, but if there were millions of such worlds, one or two might have nicely transitioned. Does that sound plausible?
Don't forget you need a smattering of heavier elements for life. So you need to wait through a couple cycles of super novas to get a decent distribution of elements over atomic 5 (Fe)... including carbon. Hving this stiff made in a star isn't enough, it's gotta accrete into a planet after.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Would the chemistry leading to primitive life, and the very earliest life forms, need cooler places? If all of space is permeated by comfy temperatures, where could things happen needing to happen at cooler temperatures? Maybe evaporation in certain places could lead to that, or some other nonequilibrium situations.
Amoebas gotta keep their primitive beer cold!
OK, so the heavy elements began to be manufactured after just 3 million years, but were they manufactured in large numbers?
And how long does it take for those heavy elements to disperse through the universe and then coalesce into a planet around a suitable star? Seems like it might be longer than 15 million years.
And life took 500 million years to get started after Earth formed. For sure, for some of that time the Earth was too hot for life to occur but 15 million years seems too short for anything useful to happen. Maybe some RNA and some enzymes if you're lucky, but that would be about it.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds -- Albert Einstein
Getting a DNA molecule of amino acids that are ALL laevo-rotary AND communicate with enzymes that were also randomly assembled will require much more than the 14,700,000,000 folks here are proposing. Try slapping a few hundred more zeroes on that number. State of the universe after 15,000,000 years means nothing unless one is foolish enough to believe what there's no evidence for. Grasping at straws, again, are you?
Cranky educator.
It could be the "Spore" game paradox whereby you leave your solar system only to find out it's all the same rubbish out there and you realize it's worth shit exploring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#They_tend_to_experience_a_technological_singularity
If it can't be achieved in the physical world just jump into a virtual one.
IMO it would be an awesome alternative to a physical existence considering virtual and physical are one and the same when it comes to your brain.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...
and all the other ducks quack back.
lol. u so quacky
"If there are a significant number of other civilizations and a significant number of those are older than us, then we ought to have detected them as soon as we started listening"
No, because my argument is that any civilisation has effectively a thin shell of accessible radio, followed by what appears to be a radio-hot source for the period in which they even still broadcast to all and sundry. In this case, then we should see radio-hot sources, so the question becomes "why don't we see them?" (With one answer being "they're not broadcasting quite so profligately to the cosmos anymore" -- even we're heading that way.)
All civilisation all long dead ago in the first "wave" of life 15 millions years ago. Now we have only sparse civilisation unable to bridge the gap between stars. And soon there shall be none.
Look at how much of our natural resource we used up in the last 50 years. uranium, coal, oil. And we have not been really making up progress in "interstellar colonization". To me it is as plain as the nose on the face : we will be spending so much of our easy extracting energy, that in the near future we will not be able to muster up the resource to start constructing even the smallest possible generation ship, much less study the tech for it.
I am betting that the great filter is simply that all civilisation mispend their energy like we did, and too late are not able to muster the resource to do anything.
Due to intensity of transmission diminushing in 1/r^2, there is almost no signal which left earth coded or not, and went beyond 1 light year before being lost in interstellar noise. The only signal were intentional high powered highly directional signal sent to in the direction of a galaxy (M10?M32?M52 ? Can't remmember). They amount tom maybe a few hours signal, and those few hours are the ONLY signal which went beyond a few light year still being detectable.
So realistically in all our history We emitted maybe at worst a few hours of signal a remote civilisation 4 light year away (or beyond) would detect !.
Arecibo was never set to detect unintentional SETI signal, we are looking for the same type of "we are here" signal we sent. As for the rest , they might be theoretical or even fantastical construct, but that's pretty much all we have, beside hoping that the spectra of the planet we try to observe has something special which makes us say "this one might have something".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
After watching James T. Kirk "managing" those green girls, they decided this planet isn't for them.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3381.pdf Extrapolating life origin back to early universe
The planets may have been in the right position but would they have had enough time to cool down?
It would be cool if life did exist, but how long did it last? If the suns then only lasted shortly and the background radiation dropped too low, would they be extinct now?
But somewhere along the road, it must have been between 273 and 300 Kelvin, just right to keep water in liquid form.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
This must be more of that new math. For the only planet that we know that has life, ours, it has been here for 2.7B years out of the 4.5B years the planet has been around. That means it took 1.8B years to form and even if that is off by 1/2, that means 900M years. It seems like a reach to expect that all of the right conditions would have been present in the 15M years available by the new calculations to allow life to form in that very narow window.
Consider instead:
You build your own AM/FM radio at home.
You switch it on.
You hear nothing but static because everyone else is using spread spectrum digital radio signals instead.
You conclude there is nobody out there.
Not sure if 15m years was enough time for baking some Oxygen and distributing it around. In a purely Hydrogen universe, there is no potential for complex chemistry needed for life. Unless we are assuming some exotic, Hydrogen-only life, I say this conjecture is bonkers.
It makes me a little sad that while the conditions were probably right for life as we know it, there is little to no chance any evidence of a specific civilization survives to the present day...
Common Sense (+1)
I don't know how up to date Wikipedia is on the matter, but according to it, Reionization (and thus, the birth of stars) didn't happen until 400 million years after the Big Bang. Without stars, no elements heavier than lithium form in useful amounts. Someone needs to go look over their new calculations again.
Life is an out-of-thermal equilibrium process, which needs the cold part of the universe to export the produced entropy necessary for sustaining life. Life does not really needs solar *energy* (otherwise earth would warm up). Actually the energy of the low entropy photons of the sun is transformed and radiated away in cold space as more numerous infrared photons. No energy is gained in average, the precise amount of solar energy received from the sun is radiated away into space, but entropy is exported. This entropy export is crucial for allowing life.
Incidentally this explains why life does not respect the second principle of thermodynamics since the biosphere is not in thermal equilibrium.
Once this understood, the scenario of the cosmologists appears completely flawed, as the cold part of the process is missing.
All the talk of Goldilocks zones and just right conditions mix with water and energy and such, then voilà! I tell you what, you do it in the lab with basic elements under perfect conditions, even accelerate it if you want so we don't have a lengthy experiment. Let me know when you actually get something that's close to life as we know it.
I wonder how uniform the temperature was in the early universe. I think temperature gradients (in fact, gradients of almost any kind) would help life and evolution.
What I'm thinking here is that you can extract energy from flowing water but not from a still lake without waves.
Seevral million years? And how long did it take on earth which had those conditions for far longer ??
Might? Doesnt equate to did. and afterwards then what ? 'The First Extinction' as the cooling wiped any progress made out of existance.
Another nothing story.
Craters on the "3M" planets Mercury, Moon and Mars show periosd of large bombardments until 3.8GY before present. Early life chemicals may have been roasted several times. Incidnetally the first strong signs of Earth life are from that era, befores supportig a rapid early evolution.
I like the "obserd" coinage, but myself I would use it to mean something that's completely absurd, and yet has been observed anyway, and must be accepted as fact.
(You know, like 38% of Republicans are still "tea party supporters".)
Apparently, life has existed on Earth for one-quarter of the time since the Big Bang.
"Life Could Have Evolved 15 Million Years After the Big Bang, Says Cosmologist" And I could have gotten up on the other side of the bed today.....but I didn't. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.... So again there is no proof. Just assumptions that must be true otherwise the lies become exposed and you all look like fools. That can't ever happen so the lies must be perpetuated. But at best we just hear "could have", "must have", "may have" to represent the extent of "evidence". Pathetic and yet you people hang on every word of these scientists so long as they continue giving you the slightest sliver of hope that you won't have to resort to acknowledging a god may exist that created everything instead of chance. Quit putting faith into Man trying to create a theory specifically to deny the existence of a god while accusing those who do have faith in the same god of being stupid for having faith in something they cannot see. Normal people call those people hypocrites. Carry on with believing in the load of lies that Satan throws at you. And may God have mercy on your souls for being so ignorant.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I can see one problem - the stars were only Hydrogen - to generate C, N, O, it needs much more than one generation of he stars, you start to get few of these elements only after the next generations - and they already live quite long.....not 3 milion years.