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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."
Since you're repeating yourself on your opinion that they're "almost identical" (and, I can't argue that that is your opinion...), I'll repeat myself on the key difference, and elaborate a bit more (so maybe we can go around in circles forever!).
Panspermia places its claims within the realm of science. The origin of life is pushed back to common physical processes of known chemistry, just occurring at a sufficiently low rate than the rate of life traveling between planets is comparable or larger than the rate of original life initiation on planets. This produces testable hypotheses: a few more generations of Mars rovers (and maybe some Europa/Io missions), and we'll have empirical data to answer questions like "was Earth-like life present during the past wet and potentially life-hospitable eras on Mars?".
ID places claims outside the realm of science: an entirely new "layer" of hyper-complex beings, which tend to be non-falsifiable. ID is often pushed to not only explain the very early initial origin of the simplest single-cellular lifeforms, but also to explain the range of later complex lifetimes for which there are already extensive scientific explanations. The historical development of ID's conceptual framework comes from a lot of extremely intellectually dishonest wankery by religious fundamentalists attempting to dress up crude Biblical literalism and anti-Evoltuion propaganda in "sciencey sounding" terms.
As a Christian, I happen to believe in a God who created the universe (and don't see this as incompatible with observable scientific materialist descriptions). However, I can certainly see a large difference between (speculative and perhaps implausible) scientific hypotheses like panspermia, and non-scientific (and dishonestly constructed) "intelligent design" theories.