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Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"

 
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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:25AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:25AM (#10592) Journal

    Those easily accessible materials are gone now (or dispersed & contaminated)

    Iron is "the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust". Silicon (glass) is #2. And unlike aluminum, they're both easily extracted and processed into useful forms with the most primitive of technology (fire). With those two, alone, you could bootstrap electrical power generation in a few weeks, and be putting it to good labor-saving uses (pumping water, heating/cooling, transportation, etc.) in no-time. Iron (or steel) wires wouldn't be as efficient as copper (#26), but they'd still do the job well enough.

    Portable energy for transportation is trickier, but excess electricity can make hydrogen from water, or charge simple batteries. A couple lead plates, or nickel and iron, both in acid, and you've got rechargeable golf-cart batteries after the apocalypse.

    It's the technical knowledge we have now, that early humans lacked. And it's very hard to entirely get rid of such useful knowledge.

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