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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.
His vast Noodly Appendeges still bathed the entire cosmos is a fine tomato based sauce.
Everyone knows the Time Lords are one of the first races of the galaxy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
That would be true regardless of whether there was life on other planets or not. No matter how closely those planets resembled Earth, they're not Earth, and while they *might* provide us with every vitamin and protein we need it does seem somewhat unlikely...
Evolution doesn't have an inevitable "upward" direction. Today's microbes are every bit as "evolved" as we are from Earth's first inhabitants. So far, humans are no more than an evolutionary blip --- perhaps one that briefly flourishes, then vanishes away with nary a trace. Given billions of more years, evolution may simply produce a differently-colored cockroach, rather than a transcendent race of super-beings.
We just killed a 500 year old clam. Now you want to kill a 5 billion year old microbe? Just for the fun of studying it? Whats wrong with you?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I don’t know about you evilutionists. But to me, these stalactites and stalagmites look very much designed. Only dogmatic Darwin worshipers could be dumb enough to believe that these stalactites and stalagmites would know where to start growing so that eventually meet at a point, conjoin, become a pillar and hold the roof of the cave up.
There is symmetry in the formations, symmetry means information, symmetry means reduction in disorder, reduction in disorder is reduction in entropy and entropy can not be reduced by random naturalistic mechanistic processes. If these formations are “natural” then they violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pathetic inability of the theory of evolution to account for the cave formations completely disproves any credibility the Big Bang Theory might have. It stretches the credulity of the American Public, 62% of whom don’t believe evolution anyway, that these scientists would confidently see amino acids and methane in planets and moons in the sky, when they cant see that mud-to-stalactite evolution is impossible.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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.
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.