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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.
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.
Everyone knows the Time Lords are one of the first races of the galaxy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
in a far away Galaxy..
With no offense to an AC on Slashdot, and acknowledging that I also do not agree with Loeb's conclusions in this paper (even describing some of it as "calculations" is stretching the word somewhat), I can confirm that Loeb is an extremely capable cosmologist who has contributed far more to science than I ever have (and, I would guess, than you ever have either - though obviously I might be wrong on that one) and than most people ever have. He's one of the people I'd say would understand the anthropic principle.
I'm not sure what he was intending to accomplish here, but in general his output is of the highest quality.
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.
No. Water is water at 300K at standard pressure. IN space, water is steam without pressure. You need gravity and an atmosphere to create pressure.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If the background radiation was 100x hotter, would there have been a lot more hard radiation flying about as well?
Hmm,- what if you had a large enough concentration of water (and other stuff, like rocks) that it remained liquid under its own gravity, hence, no steam?
I think that's called a planet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
The paper explicitly address this. More like, that's what the whole paper is about.
Previous research established that the first stars were very short lived, or as phrased in the summary:
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.
The results of this paper says that the first stars started forming 15 Myr after the Big Bang. Combine these two conjectures and you have the necessary heavy elements at 18 Myr.
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.
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.
It's not a dumb idea or question and makes sense from a certain point of view.
If you have fluidic space that means that you don't have space. Literally. Everything is so jammed packed right next to each other that it phase changes to a liquid.
My understanding of gravity tells me that would inevitably create whirlpools of "liquid" being drawn into high concentrations of liquid being compressed more and more by gravity itself. Then you have dark matter which some how is responsible for pushing matter away from each other.
What would result from that seems to be a hell of lot more chaotic than fluidic space implies. There would be energy trying to push you in one direction while at the same time fly over towards another particle with a lot more influence than you see today.
I honestly have a hard time seeing how stars could be formed, much less planets, under liquid space conditions.
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.
Yes. There would have been a lot more stars blowing up right in your vicinity, but more importantly, the newly-formed heavy elements would have been naturally accompanied by their usual radioactive isotopes, but why bother a physicist with the laws of biology, eh? :)
It is commonly thought that life evolved when it did because it's the time it took for radioactive elements to decay.
Of course, ratios of radioactive to stable isotopes vary from place to place, depending on which star blew up to create them and how old it was. But you can't really say the whole universe was a goldilocks zone. It would have taken a special place with more than just water - and the oldest galaxy we know of is 380 million years old. And let's not forget that 15 million old Earth was just a giant ball of magma... constantly being hit by giant asteroids. The Hadean period (Hades = the ancient greek version of Hell) is thought to have lasted about 600 million years.
I doubt a 15 million year old universe would have been little more than atomic soup. Water may have existed, but not as we know it. It takes more than 15 million years for a star to form and blow up, where would you have gotten enough heavy elements for a planet to arise? :)
The first stars are thought to have formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, not 15. Dude's on crack.
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.)
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
interesting... ...at what depth is the pressure great enough for water molecules to metallise?
We're talking about 1GPa of pressure at 300K here. That's 10,000 bar. Or 64 miles deep, then you're talking ice at room temperature.
(Reference: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Physics)
I don't think it would last long though (probably only a few hundred million to a couple billion years in the Goldilocks Zone), considering the surface, even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space, would start to sublime under raw solar radiation (and be instantly whipped away in a massive ion tail turning your planet into a super-giant ice comet) and particle bombardment since there would be little, if any, magnetic field to deflect said particles and no atmosphere to absorb the radiation.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
if the volume of the universe is infinite, it can be reasoned (I won't go into the why) that it was infinite fourteen billion years ago.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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.
even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
That's Hollywood science. It would actually start boiling and freezing at the same time.
If it managed to form an icy crust, this would stabilize the pressure and stop the boiling and freezing.
If it was massive enough, the gaseous water would form an atmosphere that would also stabilize the pressure. Otherwise it would probably just boil away into space over time.
With the pressure stabilized, it would only lose heat through black body radiation, which would take a long long time to freeze it because water holds large amounts of thermal energy.
the surface, even though it would be frozen solid in about 6 seconds after exposure to space
Seems I read too fast and missed some crucial words. So that's more probable.
But I think it would look more like an icy explosion of gas, like a comet tail. My guess is that it would be too violent to allow a crust to form.
Of course, putting a large volume of water in space at once is a hypothetical scenario.
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)
The radioactive isotopes are a bonus. Via differentiation, radioactive decay in a planet's core generates lots of heat and heat is what you need if you want lots of hydrothermal vents to accumulate and concentrate organic molecules for you.
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.
He is a robot left over from the creation of time it's self.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 doubt a 15 million year old universe would have been little more than atomic soup. Water may have existed, but not as we know it. It takes more than 15 million years for a star to form and blow up, where would you have gotten enough heavy elements for a planet to arise? :)
That's not quite accurate. Heavier radioactive elements would have come from supernovas, which only occur in stars much more massive than our own. The more massive the star, the higher its luminosity and the shorter its lifespan. Some of the most massive stars we've found will spend (or have spent) less than 100,000 years on the main sequence before expanding into supergiants and exploding as supernovae. So there's plenty of time for nucelosynthesis over that 15 million year span.
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
No, it would not.
This problem is about the hydrostatic equilibrium of a self-gravitating sphere of water. Let's take:
According to the last equation here, we have that:
dP = g(r) rho(r) dr
Water under great pressure does compress, but just to make things easy, let's assume it doesn't. This makes rho=1000Kg/m^3, a constant. We can also use the Shell theorem to point out that g(r)=-GM/r^2, where M is the mass inside r. We have thus:
M=4/3 pi r^3 rho
dP=-4/3G pi r^3 rho (rho/r^2)=-4/3G pi rho^2 r
Now we integrate this from R to 0, and determine that the pressure at the centre of a planet of radius R is:
P(R)=2/3G pi rho^2 R^2 :: Pascals
The radius of earth is roughly 6371Km, which means that if it were made entirely out of water, the pressure at the centre would be about 5.67gPa. Now take a look at this phase diagram for water and notice that at this pressure, and for any temperature roughly between 0 and 100C, water is in the Ice VII phase. Which is solid.
Thanks to rpenner here. Why can't I get fucking rho and pi to display?