
Eureka: First Life In The Universe - bitsweet
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/02/04/271093289/eureka-first-life-in-the-universe?sc=tw&cc=share&utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=nprfacebook&utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook
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mikeash
What a fascinating idea.

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.

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.

~~~
kamaal
Some one that got such a massive head start could have evolved by now to
survive these times. Even more so, they would have technologies to achieve
singularity and probably didn't need their biological bodies to survive any
more.

Life originating only after some 15 million years after the big bang, would by
any means be extremely super intelligent by now. So much that I guess their
very nature of existence would be unimaginable to us. If not, what happened to
them? Did they just got unlucky, got hit by asteroid every time and finally
had no one to start over? Did they self destruct? Did they achieve singularity
and those machines have managed to hide themselves since then? Or the universe
is just plain unimaginable large that even for some one somebody like them
just couldn't travel that long distances to meet others?

>>Would they consider this era to be cold and dead?

There is this thought that the science of universe we discover is based on
observation. Ever expanding universe would leave it in a state that some time
in the future people on a planet will just see darkness around them. No stars
at all!!! They will likely assume universe is just them, and empty space all
around. They would no nothing about Big Bang at all. So just like them, are we
missing critical pieces of evidence already?

Plus Stephen Hawking has suggested if we manage to survive technology
adolescence and survive to move out to space. We will eventually figure out a
way to survive the cold dead era too.

So its like they are still alive.

~~~
onetwofiveten
One idea I've had about past civilisations is to do with quantum immortality.
Suppose you did a Schroedinger's cat type experiment, but you were the cat. If
the multiple universe hypothesis is true, then when the box is opened, two
universes form, one in which you're alive and one in which you're dead. Since
you're not in the universe where you're dead, subjectively, you would simply
always survive the experiment. Now, imagine if you linked the trigger for
death to a measurement of energy. You create a box that kills you unless some
observed material randomly spikes in energy. It's a bit like a quantum suicide
version of Maxwell's demon. Subjectively, you get free energy. More than that,
this quantum killer Maxwell demon would be a fairy Godmother in disguise. You
could make anything happen as long as it is directly observable and has non-
zero probability. However, if you do it enough, anyone who isn't in the box
with you, will very likely see you die.

So there's the problem. You have a source of free energy or entropy or free
anything, but using it will make you appear dead to everyone you care about.
The solution would be to get everyone you care about together in the same box.

From our point of view, when we explore the galaxy in the future and we will
keep on finding long dead previously civilised planets which had advanced
aliens who one day suddenly bundled everyone on onto a massive spaceship and
then blew themselves up. Then one day, we'll start bundling ourselves up and
do the same.

In practical terms "bundling everyone together" might mean merging into one
consciousness (for convenience). Which would make the whole process a lot like
"The Last Question" by Asimov.

~~~
worldsayshi
Wow this is sort of like Greg Egan's Permutation City but actually seems
slightly less far fetched and it solves the "where are all the aliens?"
problem. In order to hack entropy we erase ourselves from all possible
universes where entropy is increasing.

~~~
onetwofiveten
The fun thing is that there's a high probability that the ancient aliens still
get to meet us, but a low probability of us meeting them.

------
simonh
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?

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.

~~~
ggreer
Much of the paper is devoted to calculations regarding the formation of
heavier elements and rocky planets. Surprisingly, the lifetime of the largest
stars is only 3 million years:

 _For massive stars that are dominated by radiation pressure and shine near
their Eddington luminosity LE = 1.3 × 1040 erg s−1(M⋆ /100M⊙), the lifetime is
independent of stellar mass M⋆ and set by the 0.7% nuclear efficiency for
converting rest mass to radiation, ∼ (0.007M⋆c2)/LE = 3 Myr (El Eid et al.,
1983; Bromm et al., 2001)._

Then it's a matter of figuring out how long it takes for matter to clump
together and form stars/planets. After some math and citations in section 2:

 _The above calculation implies that rocky planets could have formed within
our Hubble volume by (1+z) ∼ 78 but not by (1+z) ∼ 110 if the initial density
perturbations were perfectly Gaussian. However, the host halos of the first
planets are extremely rare, representing just ∼ 2 × 10−17 of the cos- mic
matter inventory. Since they lie ∼ 8.5 standard deviations (σ) away on the
exponential tail of the Gaussian probability distribution of initial density
perturbations, P(δ), their abundance could have been significantly enhanced by
primordial non-Gaussianity (LoVerde and Smith, 2011; Maio et al., 2012; Musso
and Sheth, 2013) if the decline of P(δ) at high values of δ /σ is shal- lower
than exponential. The needed level of deviation from Gaussianity is not ruled
out by existing data sets (Ade et al., 2013b). Non-Gaussianity below the
current limits is expected in generic models of cosmic inflation (Maldacena,
2003) that are commonly used to explain the initial density perturbations in
the Universe._

Using current best knowledge about the early universe, it looks like planets
did form, but were extremely rare. With some plausible tweaks to how "clumpy"
the initial universe was, one ends up with _lots_ more planets.

Side note: much of the paper measures time in z (red shift) instead of years.
See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distance_compared_to_z.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distance_compared_to_z.png)
to get an idea of the relationship between the two. The red dotted line is
time in the past. The black solid line is comoving distance[1]. For
comparison, some really old objects are mentioned at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Highest_redshifts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Highest_redshifts)

1\. Distance if you could freeze the universe at the present day and lay out a
bunch of yard sticks.

~~~
iwwr
Do you have a link to the actual paper?

Do you have a math relationship between time and CMB temperature?

Interested to know how long this early era of habitability lasted (not
mentioned in the article).

------
gfodor
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.

~~~
jerf
While an interesting idea, I have the same objection to that idea that I have
to the idea that life in general is abundant today, which is that we should
see the evidence of it. Any truly long-lived society is going to have to
engage in some cosmological engineering to survive, and we don't see it.

Furthermore, while any given _species_ might not have survived from so long
ago, life itself should never have died out, if intelligent life was common
and abundant. The challenges of surviving that era are such that even _we_ can
plausibly imagine being able to meet the challenges in a century, or less if
we were concentrating.

It's a poetic idea, but the universe does not look like one in which we are
some last dying ember living in the carcass of past giants; it looks like one
in which there's little-to-no intelligent life in our past light cone.

~~~
andreftavares
If you consider the "infinite" of space and, especially, time, I believe that
the probability of the existence of (at least) one "inteligent" species
capable of reaching any given place of the universe is 100%.

The question of why they don't contact us is simple: Prime Directive
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive))

Disclaimer: I'm not a particular fan of Star Trek and bumped into this
interesting principle, which I believe makes perfect sense.

~~~
jerf
Time is not infinite, and our past light cone is not infinite. It grows as
less than the cube of the space we can observe (the universe is very not
universally distributed), while the independent probabilities of whatever is
required for life multiply exponentially. The idea that the odds of life are
100% is just a naive "Big Numbers" fallacy.

The Prime Directive was created to _preserve the desired structure of drama on
a TV show_. It is ludicrous from any other perspective.

------
JoeAltmaier
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.

------
Tenoke
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)?

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.

What? No.

~~~
leobelle
Right, they seem to be confused about what the anthropic argument means.

~~~
GrantS
That gave me pause too, and this is the best explanation I could think of for
why the author brought it up: The anthropic principle can explain why we find
ourselves in a universe exactly this old, because billions of years earlier
the conditions weren't yet suitable for life. If you mistakenly think the
anthropic principle is making a fixed prediction about the point at which
suitability began, then you might think that discovery of an earlier period of
suitability would invalidate the principle, but of course it does not.

------
drjesusphd
I'm more intrigued by the possibility (however minute) that we _are_ 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.

~~~
ultimatedelman
whenever watching movies about aliens attacking our planet to consume our
resources, i've always had the thought that we're actually making movies about
ourselves when we do eventually find sentient beings somewhere out there.
which corporation is going to shell out enough money to hire an army to go get
that unobtainium?

------
richardjordan
Nobody had ever connected the dots?

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.

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
I think they meant that no one had bothered to write a paper, not that no one
had ever thought of it.

------
eru
Interesting. Though I wonder whether temperature alone is enough. You need
some gradient for energy to flow through the system.

~~~
ggreer
This is addressed in the paper. In the second paragraph of the third section,
labeled Discussion:

 _Thermal gradients are needed for life. These can be supplied by geological
variations on the surface of rocky planets. Examples for sources of free
energy are geothermal energy powered by the planet’s gravitational binding
energy at formation and radioactive energy from unstable elements produced by
the earliest supernova. These internal heat sources (in addition to possible
heating by a nearby star), may have kept planets warm even without the CMB,
extending the habitable epoch from z ∼ 100 to later times._

------
higherpurpose
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?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Imagine their despair as the temperature dropped (how quickly?) on their
planet far, far from any star. They must have thought the universe is cruel,
and God is a jerk.

------
bladedtoys
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?

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.

------
zem
see also landis's haunting piece "the melancholy of infinite space"
[[http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp](http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp)],
which starts off:

We live at the very beginning of the Universe.

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.

Ten billion years. A mere eyeblink in cosmic time. We stand at the beginning
of time, looking outward into the void of infinite time.

------
rollo
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.

------
parandroid
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?

In any way, as someone already had said, we're a bit late for the show now.

~~~
MarkTee
If that's the case, did life spontaneously come to exist on _their_ lump of
rock?

------
idoco
Upvoted for the Tom waits reference.

------
notastartup
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?

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.

