Dec 13, 2023 06:42 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 13, 2023 06:43 PM by C C.)
https://www.livescience.com/space/the-1s...e-big-bang
EXCERPT (Paul Sutter): ... So, as long as you have at least one or two generations of stars living and dying, and thereby spreading their elements out into the wider galaxy, you can have Earth-like life appearing in the universe.
This pushes the clock back on the possible first appearance of life to well over 13 billion years ago. This era in the history of the universe is known as the cosmic dawn, when the first stars formed. Astronomers aren't exactly sure when this transformative epoch took place, but it was somewhere within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. As soon as those stars appeared, they could have started creating the necessary elements for life.
So, life as we know it — built on chains of carbon, using oxygen to transport energy, and submersed in a bath of liquid water — may be much, much older than Earth. Even other hypothesized forms of life based on exotic biochemistries require a similar mixture of elements. For example, some alien life may use silicon instead of carbon as a basic building block or use methane instead of water as a solvent. No matter what, those elements have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is in the cores of stars. Without stars, you can't have chemical-based life
But perhaps it's possible to have life without chemistry. It's hard to imagine what these creatures might be like. But if we take our broad definition — that life is anything subject to evolution — then we don't need chemicals to make it happen. Sure, chemistry is a convenient way to store information, extract energy and interact with the environment, but there are other hypothetical pathways.
For example, 95% of the energy contents of the universe are unknown to physics, literally sitting outside the known elements. Scientists aren't sure what these mysterious components of the universe, known as dark matter and dark energy, are made of.
Perhaps there are additional forces of nature that work only on dark matter and dark energy. Maybe there are multiple "species" of dark matter — an entire "dark matter periodic table." Who knows what interactions and what dark chemistry play out in the vast expanses between the stars? Hypothetical "dark life" may have appeared in the extremely early universe, well before the emergence of the first stars, powered and mediated by forces we do not yet understand.
The possibilities can get even weirder. Some physicists have hypothesized that in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the forces of nature were so extreme and so exotic that they could have supported the growth of complex structures. For example, these structures could have been cosmic strings, which are folds in space-time, anchored by magnetic monopoles. With sufficient complexity, these structures could have stored information. There would have been plenty of energy to go around, and those structures could have self-replicated, enabling Darwinian evolution.
Any creatures existing in those conditions would have lived and died in the blink of an eye, their entire history lasting less than a second — but to them, it would have been a lifetime... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT (Paul Sutter): ... So, as long as you have at least one or two generations of stars living and dying, and thereby spreading their elements out into the wider galaxy, you can have Earth-like life appearing in the universe.
This pushes the clock back on the possible first appearance of life to well over 13 billion years ago. This era in the history of the universe is known as the cosmic dawn, when the first stars formed. Astronomers aren't exactly sure when this transformative epoch took place, but it was somewhere within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. As soon as those stars appeared, they could have started creating the necessary elements for life.
So, life as we know it — built on chains of carbon, using oxygen to transport energy, and submersed in a bath of liquid water — may be much, much older than Earth. Even other hypothesized forms of life based on exotic biochemistries require a similar mixture of elements. For example, some alien life may use silicon instead of carbon as a basic building block or use methane instead of water as a solvent. No matter what, those elements have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is in the cores of stars. Without stars, you can't have chemical-based life
But perhaps it's possible to have life without chemistry. It's hard to imagine what these creatures might be like. But if we take our broad definition — that life is anything subject to evolution — then we don't need chemicals to make it happen. Sure, chemistry is a convenient way to store information, extract energy and interact with the environment, but there are other hypothetical pathways.
For example, 95% of the energy contents of the universe are unknown to physics, literally sitting outside the known elements. Scientists aren't sure what these mysterious components of the universe, known as dark matter and dark energy, are made of.
Perhaps there are additional forces of nature that work only on dark matter and dark energy. Maybe there are multiple "species" of dark matter — an entire "dark matter periodic table." Who knows what interactions and what dark chemistry play out in the vast expanses between the stars? Hypothetical "dark life" may have appeared in the extremely early universe, well before the emergence of the first stars, powered and mediated by forces we do not yet understand.
The possibilities can get even weirder. Some physicists have hypothesized that in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the forces of nature were so extreme and so exotic that they could have supported the growth of complex structures. For example, these structures could have been cosmic strings, which are folds in space-time, anchored by magnetic monopoles. With sufficient complexity, these structures could have stored information. There would have been plenty of energy to go around, and those structures could have self-replicated, enabling Darwinian evolution.
Any creatures existing in those conditions would have lived and died in the blink of an eye, their entire history lasting less than a second — but to them, it would have been a lifetime... (MORE - missing details)
