What a fascinating idea.<p>I'm particularly intrigued by the perspective of hypothetical intelligent life in this era. They'd presumably be able to discover the laws of physics and the evolution of the universe as we have. They'd see that the universe was millions of years old, and presumably that would be considered a really long time. They'd know that the universe was expanding and cooling.<p>They'd extrapolate out to our era. Would they consider this era to be cold and dead? I imagine their view of this era would be similar to our view of the dark era roughly 100 trillion years hence after all stars burn out and no new ones are being created. Incidentally, the distance is at a similar order of magnitude: we're about 1000 times farther removed from that 15 million year mark, and that "dark era" is about 10000 times farther out from today.
The heavy elements (carbon, oxygen, iron, etc) we and our planet are made of were manufactured through fusion in the heart of stars. As as far as I understand it, even 15 million years after the big bang the universe was almost entirely made of hydrogen and traces of helium. Any heavier elements that did exist would still be locked up inside the first generation of stars that were making them. Perhaps the paper mentioned addressed that?<p>Still, it's an interesting notion. At some point there may have been a sweet spot between the background temperature and the availability of materials, and that point may have been billions of years in the past.
I have to admit it would be poetic and typical of scientific progress in general that while the religious texts have marked the creation of mankind as the beginning of the great cosmic opera, with our story as the center, if in fact it turned out we're not only nothing special, but worse: an epilogue, a post-credits reel, an afterthought appearing in a flicker as the lights go out well after the real saga has ended.
Anybody considered that life was then not restricted to planets? That's a 'modern' conceit. IF the entire soup of the much-denser smaller universe was room-temperature, then life could have existed in any dust-cloud or water-rich soupy place. It may have been life from a real primordial soup that settled onto planets as they formed.
Eh? What about the lack of heavier elements at this stage of the universe? Or the fact that it wasn't this warm for the next 3-4 billion years (about the time it took to form complex life here)?<p>Also:
>By demonstrating that life could have formed so early, Loeb may even have delivered a blow to so-called anthropic arguments about life in the universe.<p>What? No.
I'm more intrigued by the possibility (however minute) that we <i>are</i> alone. That's the scariest thing in the world to me: that it's up to us to preserve ourselves, what may be the most precious jewel in the universe. And we're failing.
Nobody had ever connected the dots?<p>That's nonsense. I studied Physics in the early 90s and the various possibilities for early habitability used to crop up in conversation - in the common room if nothing else.
So where are those life forms today? Have most of them gone extinct? Have some evolved to the point where we wouldn't recognize them as "life forms" today?
What would the wavelengths of the background radiation be at this time? Wouldn't there be an awful lot of high energy particles bouncing around?<p>I ask because I wonder what limits there would be to complex molecules forming under those circumstances: how much insulation would they need to protect them and whether that amount of insulation would limit the development of life.
see also landis's haunting piece "the melancholy of infinite space" [<a href="http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp" rel="nofollow">http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp</a>], which starts off:<p>We live at the very beginning of the Universe.<p>As we peer back with our telescopes toward the beginning of time, and measure the age of the universe, we are beginning to find that the universe is closer to ten billion years old than to fifty; that the oldest of the stars we see around us are, in fact, as old as any star can be; as old as the universe itself. Looking outward, we are finding that the gravity of the universe is not enough to pull it back together in some future cataclysmic big-crunch. The universe will expand forever.<p>Ten billion years. A mere eyeblink in cosmic time. We stand at the beginning of time, looking outward into the void of infinite time.
Ctrl-f metal.. nope. Metallicity. I would've thought at that time when the first stars were forming there weren't enough heavy elements to produce rocky planets yet. Some time after the first few supernovas, which should've taken just a few million years more, it should've been possible.
This makes me wonder if we are just children of some of the earlier species. If not, did life spontaneously come to existence here, on our lump of rock in space?<p>In any way, as someone already had said, we're a bit late for the show now.
My mind is utterly blown. So it's possible that there were life forms (roll of the dice) before when the temperature of the universe was best. They did not figure out how to survive or did they? If they had wouldn't they have already made contact and transferred some of their survival know hows?<p>The idea that universe gets colder and colder resulting in less and less life is reflection of our current state. We haven't found a civilization beyond this planet and I fear we never will.