How did life really begin?
(Credit: Science Documentary/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
I’ve never thought of humanity as being especially advanced.
Somehow, we struggle so much with such basic things as thermostats and civility that I cannot imagine we’ve been around since either the Big Bang or God’s Big Finger Pressing Play.
Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb gets the feeling that we are one of the last to the universe party.
As Space.com reports, Loeb’s research suggests that a mere 15 million years after the Big Bang, alien microbes might have happily survived.
He said: “When the universe was 15 million years old, the cosmic microwave background had a temperature of a warm summer day on Earth. If rocky planets existed at that epoch, then the CMB could have kept their surface warm even if they did not reside in the habitable zone around their parent star.”
Traditional scientific thinking offered that the first stars formed out of hydrogen and helium. There weren’t any so-called heavy elements that would have assisted planet formation.
Loeb asked the simple question: What if there were some heavy elements? There might have been huge stars exploding and emitting them.
Any planets that might have resulted from these explosion… [Read more]
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