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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: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:29PM

    by bill_mcgonigle (1105) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:29PM (#10722)

    Hard to see how life could existed...

    Most complex life on Earth depends on iodine - atomic number 59 (as far as I know the highest essential element). Iodine didn't exist in the early universe. Based on the metallicity of stars [arxiv.org], we should be looking about two billions years before Earth to find the earliest life, of our type.

    That's still plenty of time to have many races of Ancients around.