Scientists Find That Conditions For Life May Hinge On How Fast the Universe Is Expanding (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have known for several years now that stars, galaxies, and almost everything in the universe is moving away from us (and from everything else) at a faster and faster pace. Now, it turns out that the unknown forces behind the rate of this accelerating expansion - a mathematical value called the cosmological constant - may play a previously unexplored role in creating the right conditions for life. That is the conclusion that a group of physicists who studied the effects of massive cosmic explosions, called gamma ray bursts, on planets made. They found that when it comes to growing life, it's better to be far away from your neighbors - and the cosmological constant helps thin out the neighborhood.

Comments

well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like my quality of life goes up the further I live from my neighbors.

I could have told them that...

[ControlsGeek]

"when it comes to growing life, it's better to be far away from your neighbors -" . ... Not only that but I found its easier to create life if you are far away from your in-laws.

Most life doesn't need an ozone layer

[Dr. Spork]

Unless you're really close to a gamma ray burst, your planet will not be radiation-sterilized. And since most life is in the oceans and underground, it will not notice when the ozone layer is burned off. Anyway, the effect would be temporary. I have a feeling that this is a case of physicists who don't understand the difference between the resilience of familiar lifeforms and the resilience of life.

Re:Cosmological Constant

[HybridST]

I'm not a physicist (oops - i mean IANAP) so the standard dose of salt should apply but i have watched many lectures online about many topics within physics. My understanding is that it really is the same term but used a bit differently.

Einstein favoured a steady state term(iirc he used gamma for it) in the equations for GR which was called the cosmological constant. Along came hubble who discovered the expansion of the universe and Einstein finally gave up on the fudge-factor term he had inserted to keep the universe mostly static..

60 or so years go by until scientists in the mid 90's discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating contrary to most of their expectations. They reinstate the fudge-factor term but this time to represent so-called dark energy and it's effects on space-time.

That pretty much brings it up to date. For more info find Susskind lectures on all kinds of physics on youtube and on the Stanford site with a few honourable mentions in the repository of the Perimeter Institute's public lectures available at their site.