Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseCould life have started much earlier in the Universe?
Daniel and Katie talk about what life needs and whether it could have started much earlier in the Universe.
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Hey, Katie, how's the weather over there?
It's skill a little cold now that winter's coming.
Well, would you say it's still habitable? I mean humans can survive over there.
I moved to Italy, not to Antarctica.
Well, you know, compared to southern California, basically every place that has a winter is functionally Antarctica.
That's pretty true. I have a thick winter survival coat and flares and a bunch of huskies, and everyone else is still in their sweaters and scars.
So I wonder if that means that people like us from southern California wouldn't make good Martian colonists.
I think if they had a Martian in and out burger, people from LA would be flocking to Mars.
Maybe that's a good way to reduce the traffic here in La.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a professor at u C Irvine and a particle physicist, and I almost never drive in traffic in LA.
My name is Katie Golden, and I'm the host of Creature Feature, and I love bumper to bumper traffic, so I can read all those cool bumper stickers you guys have.
Do you ever get stuck behind a car that has enough reading material to really get you through your commute.
Yeah, I mean it's like it's a whole journey, especially when they paper different political views on the back of the bumper and I try to invent a whole interesting story for this individual.
Man.
How do people even survive traffic before podcasts? And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the universe in which we navigate the traffic of the universe to give you ideas about how everything works. We talk about the biggest stuff in the universe, the neutron stars, the black holes, the formations of galaxies. We talk about the earliest stuff in the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. We talk about how the universe will end. We don't shy away from any question on this podcast. We dig into it, we open it up, we spread it all around on toast, and we serve it to you. And my friend and co host jorgees on a break today, so we are very happy to have our regular and wonderful guest host, Katie. Katie, thanks very much for joining us today.
Always a pleasure to be here and to look into the mysteries of the universe. You said, I could ask any question right, no matter what, no matter what, no matter what.
But now you got me a little scared.
I want to know when the first butt appeared in the universe.
You mean the first behind or the first.
Yeah, the first behind, the first tushy? Is that not appropriate you said anything?
I think that's a deep interesting question about the nature of the universe. And you know, was that a good looking butt or not? Like, you know, did butts evolve and then people learn to appreciate or was it the other way around?
What came first, the chicken or the butt?
You know, I don't know the answer to that question, so off the bat, you've already stumped me. But it does open up a whole other genre of questions about firsts, you know, when things first happened in the universe, Because I think people see sometimes the history of the universe as inevitable, like the universe started dot dot dot, we are here. But you have to remember that there's lots of potential paths for the universe. There's quantum randomness at the beginning of the universe that massively influenced the entire shape and structure of the universe. Why we have galaxies here, why we don't have galaxies there? The universe could have been very different from the universe that we have today. So it's really interesting to ask questions about the first time something happened because it gives you a glimpse into how the universe might have been.
How likely do you think it would have been that Earth never formed? Like, is it really lucky that Earth happened at all? Or was that something that seemed bound to happen?
Well, yeah, that depends a little bit on what you define Earth. You know, the exact details of the Earth, the way it is with people on it and their butts in their particular shape and people having podcasts. You know, it's essentially infinitesimal, right, It's almost zero. And the other thing to remember is that the Earth hasn't been around during most of the universe. Universe is like fourteen billion years old. The Earth is only four or five billion years old, so most of the history of the universe was earthless.
Wow, So where would we go then in that kind of universe? Like, do you think there are other earths out there that we could just PLoP our keyasters right down on or are we pretty fortunate to have our Earth.
It's still an open question in science, you know, what those other planets are like and how earth like there are. We've talked on the podcast before about what other planets might be out there, and in the last twenty years or so, we've actually seen planets around other stars and even found a few that seem to be earth like. But you know, by earth like we basically just mean a rocky planet that's close enough to its star that has enough warmth to melt ice. We don't really know what those planets are like, so we don't know if there are a lot of Earths out there teeming with life, or if we really do have a very very special home in the universe.
We cannot attest to the quality of these off brand Earth.
Sometimes the generics are even better than the.
Original, you know, certainly cheaper.
But it makes me wonder could Earth have formed earlier in the universe, because you know, the universe is expanding rapidly and now things are further and further apart than they used to be, and so if we had been around five billion years ago, we could have seen a very different kind of night sky. We could have learned different things about the universe if we'd been around in an earlier epoch makes me wonder like would have been possible for Earth to form five billion years ago? And it raises really interesting questions like could there have been alien civilizations that you know, arode, lived and then burned themselves out all billions of years before life even started on Earth.
What would you see in the night sky like staring up from this early version of Earth.
Well, the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating, so as time goes on, we can see a smaller and smaller portion of the universe. Of course, we don't know how big the universe is at all, so we don't know what portion we're seeing. But as time goes on, things fall off the edge of the observable universe because it's expanding faster than the speed of light. So five billion years ago we could see more galaxies, and before that we could see even more stuff. And so if we've been around very early in the history of the universe, we could see things that are now invisible and that no human might ever see.
So would the sky just be dotted with stars and galaxies or even black holes that we're not even aware of? Or never will be aware of.
We don't know what that night sky would have held because we will never see you what's there, It's gone forever we missed it. It's like we showed up for the second season of the Universe TV show and somebody deleted the first season. It's just gone.
I have this cosmic case of foma right now that I cannot even begin to describe how frustrating it is.
But in order to ask these questions about the universe, in order to look up at the night sky and wonder what's out there, you need to have somebody alive, somebody intelligent to do that observing. And so that leads us to wonder about when that could first happen, When you could first have sort of intelligent beings gazing up with the universe scribbling down notes.
Yeah, I mean it seems like as long as you have some kind of conditions that could have life, right, like I would be happy guessing like, Okay, if you can't have the conditions, let's just assume that maybe life could take hold there. But from what you're describing, this is a lot more of a chaotic situation than what we might think.
Absolutely, there's lots of stuff to dig into there. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question when is the earliest life could have started in the universe? And I think what you just said is really interesting, something about how assuming if the bits are in place, that life will start.
I don't think that's necessarily a guarantee, but based on our planet Earth and how life seems to be so tenacious and end up popping up basically anywhere that it can find a niche, I think there is a good chance that as long as you have the ingredients for life and enough time, which that is key, obviously, it has a pretty good chance of happening. But this is all conjecture, and I mean, I'm curious what other people think about what's going on and how life could have started.
Well, it is conjecture, but I like hearing your point of view. You seem to be sort of a cheerleader for life. You're like, come on, life, you can do it. You got the materials. I believe in you.
I'm standing by a little bean sprout with a couple of cheerleading pompoms and you're like, go, go, you can do it. If you can't do it, then I don't know I guess we're alone in the universe.
Well, it does seem sad, sort of an empty if the universe exists with all the materials for life, but it just sort of doesn't come together and get started. So, as usual, I was wondering what people out there on the Internet thought about when the earliest life could have begun in the universe. So I reached out to our listeners who were happy to volunteer to answer questions. These listeners have had no chance to prepare their answer. They just responded spontaneously, so we could get a sense for what people are thinking and what they already know. If you'd like to participate for a future episode, please don't be shy. Write to me two questions at Dangelandhorge dot com and you can hear your off the cuff speculation on the podcast. So before you hear these answers, think to yourself, when do you think is the earliest moment life could have begun in the universe.
I'm going to say at least earlier than last Wednesday.
And that's from a biologist, folks, Right there, she's an authority. All right, here's what people had to say.
The first stars were really just hydrogen and helium, which is not enough to have generated life based components. So I would say we would need at least second generation stars in order to have heavier elements involved.
Well, I assume that life would need an energy source like we have the Sun. So my guess would be that the first life formed shortly after the first stars did. I'm not quite sure when that was, so if I had to guess, I would say maybe five hundred million years after the Big Bang.
I know the Earth went through a period of heavy bombardment and we couldn't have had life then. We know that, so yeah, I think it has to be pretty stable, but I don't know when the earliest that would have happened in the universe.
Oh, let's define life.
I would define life.
I've as the first molecule, and I would guess that would be in the first billion years since the universe begun.
I would say that maybe somehow life could have developed when the universe kind of became cool enough for it and transparent, so maybe it could have been around three hundred I think that's about three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, is when we first got the cosmic microreave background radiation. So maybe somehow in that soup there could have been at least you know, single cell life or something along those lines.
Huh.
I think that the airless life in the universe may have been some kind of etraterrestrial in some other galaxy. I don't think that life become here in the Earth.
Life as we know it, or life in general. Well, I would say life in general in some exotic form, and depending what you consider life, if complex, you know, self replicating proteins are, life might have started fairly early on within I don't know, hud a million years or so at since the beginning of the universe. But life as we know it takes a long time to evolve. I would say that requires at least some small number of billions of years.
I thought that was really interesting. These are really smart guesses. It seems like people are basing their guesses on what they think to be going on with the early universe in terms of how chaotic it is, you know, what the chemical composition of stars are.
But it's also interesting to hear about what people consider to be early in the universe. You know, somebody says pretty early the first billion years, it's like, wow, man, a billion years is a long time to wait. Like if I invite you to party at my house and you're a billion years late, you consider yourself still pretty early.
I mean, I think it's fashionable, right, I don't know etiquette.
That's probably different over there in Italy.
Also la vida doulce.
But it gives you a sense of just the cosmic scope here. And you know, it's really hard to get your mind around the length of time we're talking about. Even human history is difficult to imagine. You know, Think about what it was like to live five thousand years ago. Think about all the people that have lived between now and then, all the times they woke up, all the times they scratched their heads, all the arguments, the marriages, the divorces, you know, the triumphs and disappointments. That's an incredible amount of time. And that's just like the tiniest slice of the time the humans have been on Earth.
All right, I'm cross eyed now, we can't keep on doing this. It seems like a whole heck of a lot of stuff cosmically can be going on in a billion years? Or is that nothing to a star?
Exactly a billion years is a very long time for us, but for the universe, it's just a little slice of all the time that has happened. So, you know, try to like get your mind around a million years, a billion years. I don't even know if it's possible to do, you know, I guess maybe thinking about billionaires, like think about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk how much money they have compared to how much money you have, And maybe that'll give you a sense for like the amount of time we're talking about.
I do think about that a lot. But so in these early stages of the universe, we have these vast periods of time that seemed just incalculable to humans. But in terms of what's going on with the universe, are there things happening there that would be, in your opinion, prohibitive to life, say, in like the first billion years of the universe's lifespan.
Absolutely, in the very beginning of the universe, things were pretty hot and crazy. You know. I think we'll get into it a little bit more later, but the first moments of the universe, for example, the universe was very very dense and very very hot. You know, you're talking about like the inside of a star, very high temperatures, very high density, crazy interactions constantly. It's hard to imagine life as we know it existing, at least in the very early universe. Yeah.
I know some very dense and hot people too.
But you know, maybe we should start with thinking about what life needs, what the typical conditions are for life as we know it, and then we can figure out when those things occurred in the universe.
Oh yeah, I kind of know this one, at least in terms of the biological aspects of life. You need water, that's super important. You need some kind of energy which can be converted into energy that life can use. Like I said earlier, you need some time for this to be able to happen, sort of like baking. You can't put all the ingredients for a cake into the oven, take it out after a minute and expect anything other than a chocolate soup.
There's no life microwave version of the universe that you can sort of like zap life into.
Existence, right my microwave brownie version of the primordial soup. And energy often will mean like something like our sun gives the Earth energy. You need there to be things that are not too hot, like enough chemicals going on that can help create these protein chains or maybe even something that is different from how our carbon based life form is on Earth. But certainly you would need a little bit of stability as well, otherwise the chaos and entropy is just gonna knock everything down like a bunch of dominoes.
So from a physics point of view, needing an energy source like a star to keep you warm makes perfect sense. And you need a surface to get to the right temperature, and you need enough time. All that makes sense to me as a physicist. What about the materials though, you were talking about for biochemistry, Like what elements do you need and why do you need them? Like why do we have carbon and oxygen and nitrogen? Why do we need all of those elements to make life? Why couldn't we have assembled it out of just helium and hydrogen.
I mean, my understanding of it is that carbon is such a powerful base for life based on how these molecules can connect to one another. You have carbon with its four little arms that can connect and form all sorts of good molecules that can be used for a variety of things that life needs. So you need at least our kind of earth based life needs protein chains to create the DNA that is the basic building blocks of all life. You need some kind of complex molecule that you can create and recreate in order to be a blueprint for creating an organism. Otherwise, if you can't have these bonds that you can easily create and then rearrange and build basically, like you know, when you think of legos or connects or whatever you're building thing is of choice. You need atoms that are capable of making these connections and being built in such a way that is conducive to forming something like proteins that are used in DNA. I mean, that's that's my limited understanding of atomic scale biology.
Well, a lego example makes a lot of sense to me. If somebody just gave you a pile of legos and they were only just those little thin one pieces, you could really build anything, because all you can do is like stack them on top of each other. If you can't like connect them to other pieces very easily, and if you want to make something more complex, you need some larger pieces that you can use to like build out a backbone and extrapolate from and build other elements. And so that makes a lot of sense to me that you just need like complex enough bits in order to make the complexity we have in our life. So our list of requirements so far is like an energy source for some warmth, some raw materials with enough complexity in them, and then just enough time.
Yeah, and I think the time thing seems pretty important when we're considering the age of the universe, because if you have a really chaotic system, that's going to cut down on your time for anything to happen, right Like, if you have a planet that's being constantly smacked in the face with meteors, it's not going to give whatever life could potentially form on the surface enough time to even form before it gets just obliterated into more stardust.
Absolutely, So I want to talk about when that might have all come together in the early universe, how long it took to assemble all those bits and give it the time to cook around and turn into something yummy and fun and hilarious. But first, let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets with Mint Mobile You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi spees and restrictions apply. See mint Mobile for details.
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Yeah, and why haven't they given me a call yet, you know, not even email.
Well, you know, it just takes time. They want your podcast career to like marinate for another million years or so then they'll give you a call.
Maybe they're offended because I only cover Earth animals and I haven't covered like Bersork two animals on their planet of Bersork a Zork too.
I don't know how your advertisers would feel about their stuffs. I don't know if the people on Bersork really.
Buy anything so new phlim Yeah, I can see how that's a problem. So Okay, we talked about the ingredients we need, right, like warmth. We need the right materials like we need water. We need various chemical compositions to be able to make building blocks like DNA. And we need the right temperature right like it can't be too hot and it can't be too cold. When it's too cold, things are really slow, right, And if it's too hot, things are way too fast, right mm hmm.
And I'm sure there are people out there wondering, like, hey, why are you guys just talking about life as we know it. Well, we'll get there. We'll talk about other crazy forms of life, but let's at least begin with the kind of life that we're thinking about. So first up on that list of ingredients is warmth. Right, we need a star, essentially, we need something to heat us. And in the very early universe, of course, there were no stars. Things were very hot and dense. It was all sort of like the inside of a star. But then things expanded rapidly and things started to cool down, and after about three hundred and eighty thousand years, all the particles that were flying around settled down into elements, they neutralized, and then you just have these vast clouds of gas, almost exclusively hydrogen and helium.
So vast clouds of gas, and yet no butts yet.
Interesting so far, zero butts in the universe. It's a butt for universe so far. And those clouds of gas are just sort of like cold and floating out there, and some pockets of them are a little denser than other pockets because of quantum fluctuations in the early universe, and those very gradually start to gather together because if you have one bit that's a little denser, then it has more gravity than the other bits, and so it wins the tug of war and starts attracting more atoms. Of those gases and more and more and more, and eventually you coalesce enough of them that you can get enough gravitational pressure that stars can start to form and burn. But it's not a very quick process because gravity is super duper weak. You know, the gravity of Earth is pretty weak. You can overpower it just with like your legs. You're overpowering the entire gravity of a whole planet.
Yeah, but if you try to overpower the gravity to get into space, that's kind of difficult, right, So why isn't it easier to get a rocket into space if gravity is so weak.
That's just because you have nothing to push against. If you had a ladder, you could definitely climb up into space and it would get easier and easier as you got higher and higher. So really, the only reason it's hard to get out into space is that you have nothing to push against once you take that first jump. So if you could just like climb a mountain up into space, it wouldn't actually be that hard.
So maybe we should do space ladders instead of these big, old fancy rockets.
Huh, Yeah, you're joking maybe, But there really is a technology there. It's called a space elevator. If you can assemble a cable which connects the surface of the Earth to like some huge rock out there in orbit. Then you can build an elevator that just climbs that cable. It doesn't take nearly as much energy.
That would really suck though, if you're on like the space elevator and someone pressed all the buttons, because that would take like.
Years when there's only two buttons. There's Earth and there's space.
Right, So how long would it take for a star to form, given that it's this really slow, gradual process.
We think it might have taken fifty to one hundred million years. And they're not just combating the weakness of gravity. They need to be cold enough. Remember that temperature is like a speedometer for the particles in a gas, really high ten. But your gases have particles that are zipping around super fast, and those will resist gravity's tug because they're moving fast enough. So you need these clouds of gas to get cold enough that gravity can win against their velocity and actually pull them together. So it takes fifty to one hundred million years, we think, before the first stars start to burn.
And so you wait about one hundred million years, right, and you've got a nice star going, Are we ready to start some life under that stars? There's some kind of problem we're going to run into.
Well, that gives us our first ingredient. Right now we have a source of warmth. But if you want a rocky planet to form your life on, well, there are no rocks yet. Remember the universe so far is just hydrogen and helium, and so all you can do are form denser or less dense blobs of hydrogen and helium. In order to make rocky planets things that have like iron or even carbon or oxygen, so you can make water. Then you need heavier elements in the universe, and that happens at the heart of stars. So in our Solar system, for example, that's happening at the heart of our Sun. It's making heavier and heavier elements. The elements that became the Earth, however, were not made in our sun. Of course, they were made in a previous sun that burned for billions of years and then spewed those elements out into the universe. But in the first round of stars there was nothing else. So you can't have a rocky planet around those first stars.
So when we're talking about the big Bang, and the Big Bang happens, it spreads out all these elements. But those early elements were more stuff that stars could be formed out of. And only once you had the high energy of the star. Is it because of how hot a star is that they can make those new denser elements.
Yeah, the Big Bang was almost all helium and hydrogen. And then to make the heavier elements, which you have to do is take those atoms and push them together, push the nuclei together. And those nuclei don't like to come together, like two protons the core of two hydrogen atoms, they don't like to come together to make helium because they're both positively charged. They repel each other. So to force them together until they stick together and become a heavier nucleus requires you to have a lot of pressure and temperature, so sort of like the universe starts out really hot and dense, and then it cools and spreads out, and then you have to compactify it again. So you can get that really hot furnace at the inside of a star that's capable of generating these heavier elements, and that can only happen inside those stars. So you need stars to form to make the raw materials you need for rocky planets in later generations of stars.
Okay, so no stars, no rocks, but once you've got stars, they can start, you know, popping out some rocks, or at least not popping out rocks exactly, but popping out the elements that could then congeal and form rocks. How long do you think it takes from when a star forms and can create these heavier elements to getting let's say, like a small planet.
It's really interesting. We think that those first generation of stars actually didn't burn for very long, Like our sun is going to burn total lifetime about ten billion years, which is pretty long. But some stars, we think will burn for billions and billions and billions more, maybe even trillions of years. And the thing that determines how long a star lives is its size. A bigger star burns hotter and so it burns through its fuel faster, and a smaller star burns colder, so it doesn't burn its fuel as quickly. So we think that these first stars were really huge, like hundreds of times the mass of the Sun, maybe even more, so they only burned a few million years or maybe tens of millions of years, maybe even up to hundreds of millions of years in some cases, and so we think that probably it took a few hundred million years before you had even those elements existing in the universe, you know, to have some like heavier things than helium, but they were at the heart of those stars. So then you need those stars to die and to explode, to go like supernova and blow out some of those materials into the universe to be like compost for the next generation of stars and solar systems that come to form. So probably a few hundred million years before you have some raw materials, but those raw materials, you have some heavier elements, but probably not that much carbon and oxygen.
All right, So you've got this first generation of stars that were huge and really hot and burn bright but for shorter and they explode and they give fuel to other stars to form as well as spreading out elements throughout the universe. What time are we at. We spent what was it, like, one hundred million years for those stars to form. We spent another what was it another one hundred million years?
A few hundred million probably, Yeah.
A few hundred million years for those suns to create these elements explode, and then it would take some time for the news stars to form, right, and then take some time for those elements to start to cluster into actual rocks, big space rocks. But we still don't have like you mentioned, we don't have carbon and oxygen yet.
Yeah. In order to make carbon and oxygen, which are a few steps up the chain fusing lighter elements, you need stars to burn sort of a long time so they can get like really nice and hot at the center you have a chance to like walk up the ladder of the periodic table. So for that to happen, you need stars to be a little bit smaller so they can burn longer, because short lived stars burn really hot and fast and just sort of like convert all the hydrogen helium and then explode. And so you need to wait maybe like a billion years after the Big Bang for those smaller, longer burning stars to give up all the carbon and oxygen they've been making at the core. So now we're like a billion years into the universe. We have a bunch of stars, some of them are the second general of stars, and we have enough of these rocky materials probably to come together and form planets, we have oxygen, we have carbon, but we've already spent a billion years. Like, think about all of that time that's passed. It's incredible, you know that all that time nobody observed it. Like it's probably impossible for any form of life as we know it to have formed. But in that first period of the universe, it's essentially like dark from an intellectual point of view.
I mean, if you want it done, you can either have it done fast or get you can have it done well. That's what my dad always said. So we need an entire billion of years to even have a universe that could possibly possibly foster life, like just to have the ingredients necessary for life. But that doesn't mean the ingredients are all in the same place at the same time. Right, they're in the universe kind of floating around, but they're not you know, in these neat, little like pots where you're cooking life up.
That's right. But you know, if it's out there, then eventually some solar system will form and it'll have enough of these rocky materials in it that you'll get planets forming around the Sun.
How long does it take for a solar system to form?
We think it takes something like ten million years. Oh that's nothing it needs to see Like, you have a cloud of stuff and it might just hang out for a long time for billions of years. Like, not every cloud immediately collapses. You can look at it in the night sky right now and see big molecular clouds in our galaxy that have not yet formed stars. You need some sort of like trigger either needs to cool down enough to collapse, or sometimes you need like a nearby supernova to come by and give a shockwave which creates a collapse in the cloud.
Is that what we see when we're looking at the Milky Way, these clouds of space stuff?
Yeah, our galaxy is still forming new stars in those clouds. Sometimes it's two clouds like smash into each other that can create a bunch of stars, or some sort of trigger needs to happen sometimes to collapse these clouds. Otherwise it just takes a long long time for them to cool And so we think that after the first generation of stars have formed, then the universe is like point one percent heavy metals, and then our solar system, for example, is about one percent heavy metals. So still the universe is like overwhelmingly like hydrogen and helium just like one percent. Billions of years have been spent making these heavy metals and you're still only up to one percent. But that's enough.
You can't see it, but I'm thrown up double horns for.
That heavy metal universe exactly. But that's enough to make rocky planets like our solar system is on average about one percent not hydrogen and helium. But there's enough to make a whole Earth, right, like enormous blobs of iron and nickel and gold and all the amazing stuff you need to make the complexity of life on Earth. That's enough. So after billion years or so, we think that probably those ingredients are there. And then we get to the really interesting question you were asking earlier, which is like how long do you have to cook it before it turns into life. You have a rocky planet, you have liquid water on the surface, you have carbon and oxygen and nitrogen floating around. How long before that becomes life?
Right? And one of the main enemies of life is chaos, and the universe, especially earlier on and a planet when it's new is typically very chaotic, right, Like that is one of the defining things of like a new planet for me, you just have like boiling seas of various chemicals and you know, unstable sort of geography, and so it's kind of hard to have a planet that's not is at a point of its life where it's calmed down enough that you could even have these delicate chains of proteins come together. But it isn't so calm that nothing's happening at.
All, right, because you need a little bit of chaos, right, You need enough opportunities, You need things to bump into each other often enough so the right pieces can like randomly assemble. And of course we don't know how that happened. It's still like a big mystery how life started on Earth. But it is really interesting to look at the timing of it. Right, you were saying life is tenacious, it starts. So what do we know about when life started on Earth? How long did that take, Katie, before our rocky planet started having little critters on it?
It was a long time. It was like a billion years, right, yeah.
Another billion years. Like imagine you have this whole rocky planet with all the ingredients, you put it in the oven. You got to wait a billion years before life starts.
It certainly is weird. To me to think about it like that, because I think about the universe itself and it seems so timeless, And it took the universe a billion years to get to the point where you have you're starting to maybe have conditions where you can have planets and maybe the materials you might need for life. But then it took a whole other billion years on our planet for the first like little life spaghettis, little protein chains to even form. It's I don't know, there's something mind numbing about how vast that is.
Well, think about all the things that have to come together in just the right way, and the likelihood of that happening is very small, so you need a lot of opportunities, which means it could take a long time. On the other hand, as you were saying, conditions on Earth weren't really very hospitable in the beginning. You know, the Earth's surface was like magma, and then there was the huge bombardment of asteroids as the Solar System was still sort of calming down.
We still have some signs of those asteroids, right, like big craters and formations on our planet that are like these old battle scars.
So from that point of view, life started sort of pretty quickly after things calm down, like when you have the right conditions, meaning the basic elements and the right temperature, and you know, you're no longer raining fire from the sky and being dissolved in lava. You didn't have to wait that long after that for life to start. And that's just one example, but it's sort of suggestive. It suggests that maybe life isn't that hard to get started. You got the right ingredients in the right place, and maybe just wait a few million years or even one hundred million years, and presto, it will start.
Do we know, like when the Earth started to calm down, so to speak, like from when the Earth formed to when the Earth was no longer so jittery and chaotic that it was just simply too toxic of a personality to host life.
Yeah, that was a few hundred million years exactly. So life really did start on Earth pretty quickly after conditions were hospitable. Something I've always wondered about is whether it might have been possible for life to have started on Earth multiple times independently, like you know, a little colony starting on this side of the planet, and another colony maybe using a completely different biochemical technology starting on the other side of the planet, and in a weather it could have been like a massive war and our kind of life won and wiped out the other kind of life entirely, the way like there are species and genuses in our own history that we've exterminated.
And it could even be something where you have these little pockets of life. They don't even have to have a war, but one of them just kind of fizzles out, whereas the other one manages to make it. Because you know why I'm talking about these protein chains is that is kind of what is thought to have been sort of the first little bits of life where you can you need a chain of protein to form DNA that can build an organism. Even a teeny tiny unicellular organism needs DNA structure. Even viruses, things that we hardly call life at all, needs a sort of DNA structure in order to replicate it. So that seems to be the key element. And for that to happen, you need these protein chains that are not strong, they're kind of weakly bonded. And so if you have you know, some rampant molecules zooming around and say a primordial soup they're gonna knock over this delicate protein chain like bowling pins at a bowling alley, and there goes your first attempt at life. And actually, one of the more compelling theories I've heard of for why life was able to take hold so relatively quickly when you think about just the absurd probabilities, is instead of it being a primordial soup, it's more of a primordial bacleva where you may have these thin sort of sheets of rock, and between them these proteins and molecules can kind of get nestled in there and start to form these chains without being disturbed. So I could imagine a situation where you have life trying to start in different parts of the world and then just getting obliterated by the chaos, and then a few places where hey, it's starting to form in these little nooks and crannies of these rocks where it has this safe refuge and then manages to reach enough strength that it doesn't immediately get obliterated by other molecules.
And it's amazing to think about how our little pocket of life won those battles and survived that crazy, chaotic time, and how different life might be on Earth, if a different little pocket had survived, if the temperature had been slightly different, or a rocket hit in a slightly different spot.
We may have had more than one butt.
So to summarize, that means that we think it took about a billion or so years for the basic elements to be in place, the carbon and the oxygen, the nitzrogen, the rocky planets, the stars, the temperature, and then maybe it took another billion years for things to calm down on that particular planet. That means that life might have started in the universe just a couple of billion years in. That's something like eleven billion years ago. That's billions of years before the Earth even formed, which means that you know, if all this regulation is correct, there could be life in the universe. That's billions and billions and billions of years older than life on Earth.
Right, because it took ten billion years for us to come on the scene. So there's something amazing about the idea of like, not only might we not be alone in the universe, but we might never have been alone, Like life might have been going about its business in different select little pockets of luck in the universe for all this time.
That's right, So let's talk about how life might have formed. That's not like life as we know it in the universe and weather. It might have started in a very very very very early universe if that was possible. But first, let's take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone. Know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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All right, we're back, and we're marveling at how long it took life to get started here on Earth compared to the cosmic sweep of history. Wasn't until almost ten billion years into the universe that critters on Earth started to squirm and exchange proteins. Whereas we've concluded that it might only take a couple of billion years for the universe to be hospitable to life as we know it. But of course we're talking about life like we know it with one butt and proteins and DNA and RNA and you know, living on a water planet and using our kind of biochemistry. That's just the only example we've ever seen.
Now, to be fair, there are Nigerians on our planet that have more than one butt.
But do continue Well, that's a whole other podcast episode, but I think that's probably gonna be in your podcast rather than ours. But I'm looking forward to listening. But it does make you wonder, you know, whether life could exist in other forms, and whether those other forms might be conducive to starting even earlier in the universe. So I've heard people speculate about building life out of other biochemical strategies, you know, using ammonia instead of water, using silicon instead of carbon. Do you find those credible, Katie? Do you think those are just science fiction or do you think it might be the way alien life actually works out there in the universe.
I mean, I think it kind of depends first on how we define life, right, Like, that's kind of a tricky question itself. We can't just say, you know, life, because there is currently some debate over what we consider to be life, even on Earth. Right, So, like a virus like we mentioned earlier, a lot of people do not consider to be life because they are sort of more like these little robots that replicate themselves purely through facilitation of other cells, which is very bad for us when they try to do that. But then you could say, well, okay, but it does reproduce, right, and it does consume other material in order to reproduce. Is that not life? And so I think the likelihood of there being earlier life and life made out of things like silicon and different types of more unconventional molecules depends on what we think, like if we expand sort of our understanding of what life is.
Yeah, and going back to our earlier motivation, wondering when there might have been intelligent eyes looking out onto the universe, thinking about galaxies and the nature of reality. If you have a planet that's got like single cellular life on it, or even just viruses or something, they're not doing any astronomy, they're not doing particle physics, they're not figuring out the secrets of the universe. And so while we paint a picture that the universe might be filled with life even as we know it that's billions of years old, it's also possible that that life is kind of dumb, right like life on Earth started about a billion years after the Earth began, but intelligent life that's pretty recent, and that might suggest that it's unusual, that it's uncommon. So it might be that there's life everywhere out there and that it's been around for billions of years, but it's very rare for there to be intelligent life actually asking questions about the universe. And that's a little sad, you know, to all these critters out there rolling along the surface of their planets but nobody looking up, nobody thinking deeply about the nature of their existence.
I guess that's kind of sad, But I think it's also you know, when you start to have some kind of simple thing, right like, all complicated systems start with something really simple. And even though it's true that they don't necessarily ever create something more complex, there's a lot of luck and a lot of good conditions you need. The existence of something simple and dumb often means that eventually you will get something complicated and smart.
Maybe, and you know, maybe it's not so sad. Maybe they're very happy because they're busy. You know what. They say that the root of all suffering is desire, and so maybe those creators are just happy being Those creators are now thinking deeply about the universe, and maybe there's a lesson there about how to live your life. But I like to think about other alternative forms of life. You know, whether, for example, you could have life that forms on the inside of stars, whether you know, even without a rocky planet, if you could have like patterns in the flow of plasmas that are self replicating, right.
Because it seems like one of the defining characteristics of life isn't necessarily the stuff it's made out of, but the fact that the stuff forms a pattern that can be replicated and have it increase in complexity over time. Right. My understanding of the inside of a star is one, it's very hot. I probably shouldn't be in there. And two it's just a roiling, boiling mess of hot elements being formed and pushed and you know, just incomprehensibly hot and chaotic. So how could life ever form in such an environment.
It would have to be life that's pretty different from life than we imagine it. But we do see some some sort of structures inside stars, and it's not something we understand very well, like even the patterns within our own sun we do not understand. But there are these massive currents of convection inside the sun, these huge flows of plasma. We know they have to exist because they are what generate, for example, the magnetic field of the Sun, which comes because you have huge flows of these charge currents, and where magnetic fields come from charged particles in motion, So that definitely happens, and you have these big tubes that are controlled by the magnetic field, and so you might imagine in some sort of science fictiony way that these currents could form and reproduce themselves somehow, but you've got to be pretty creative. On a smaller scale, we have actually seen particles within a plasma sort of self organized, like if you have dust particles inside your plasma, they can sometimes form these like helices that are self organized, and people have imagined that you could build more complex structures from them. But I think you're right that it's fighting a pretty tough battle because there's so much energy that is easy to dissociate, to disassemble anything that happens to come together. So it's not something that we've really figured out exactly even how to ask the question. But I think there's an intellectual opening there to imagine how life might exist inside stars or in huge flows between stars, even in the plasma of the interstellar medium.
Right, because what we talked about with life starting on a chaotic Earth is that we potentially had a little refuge. Right, Like the primordial soup hypothesis might not really work if the soup is too chaotic. But if you have like a primordial pastry, a primordial bac levah, where you have some kind of like layers of rock where life can squeeze in and find a little bit of an island of stability, it might form. So is there a way for there to be a part of a star inside the star in this plasma, for there to be a little like refuge or island of refuge where there could be some stability inside an unstable environment.
It's possible, but it really is a lot of speculation, and so it's just something that we need to continue thinking about. It's really like an intellectual frontier where people are still trying to figure out whether it's possible and whether you could assemble something. But I did really really interesting paper recently thinking about not life inside stars, but life even before stars, like wondering about whether you could use the whole universe as your energy source. Remember we said that you need some sort of energy to keep life warm, right, and so we were thinking about using stars. But the universe actually was quite warm in the very beginning, right, The universe was super duper hot in the first few moments, but then it cooled And now space outside is like three degrees kelvin, but it cooled from very very hot to three degrees kelvin. That means that at some moment it was around you know, three hundred degrees calvin, which is like you know, room temperature for us. So there was a moment when the universe before stars were even formed, when it was just like a bunch of big cloud of gas, that it was about the right temperatures like the room temperature universe.
And so that's good in terms of the temperature, I mean, that sounds nice to me, especially because it's cold here right now. But in terms of what the building blocks are like, how would that work out?
Right?
What are we working with in terms of these smallest building blocks that could organize into some kind of pattern.
It is a real challenge. And astrophysicists, however, have already labeled this time in the universe around fifteen million years after the Big Bang. They call it the habitable epoch of the universe, just because it's about the right temperature. And I think it's funny to sort of imagine yourself in that universe because we think of space is so cold, but back then, like space was pretty warm, Like the whole universe was around room temperature. But you're right, how could you form life at that time? It's pretty tough because, as we said, basically everything is just clouds of gas helium and hydrogen, and so in order to get like the heavier elements, you need to make carbon and oxygen. They just weren't around. There is a paper though, that suggests that it might be very unlikely, but it is possible for those things to happen, for those elements to come together, even in those clouds. They did a calculation that suggests it's like a one in ten to the seventeen chance for these things to just sort of like self assemble in these clouds, to get like a nucleus of you know, carbon and oxygen and a little blob there happening.
And so it could actually be like carbon based life just floating in space, in this warm sort of space stew.
Yeah, in this bath, in this like universe soup. And I can't emphasize enough how speculative this is. This is not like we think this happened. This is like, let's stretch our minds and try to imagine whether it could. Let's release as many constraints as possible, and remember that the universe is vast and even things that are very unlikely could potentially happen. If we're really asking the question about the first time life started, then you got to really push back and allow for crazy stuff to happen.
Now, don't back pedal because you said it was this habitable epoch. It sounds really nice. I mean, get like some swim floaties in an inner tube and jump in there and expect only the best to happen.
Yeah, but it was a pretty crazy time and there are lots of things going on, and so even if somehow you had like the formation of these heavy elements in the very very early universe, and it was living in this soup, and somehow life began. It didn't last for very long, like the universe was this temperature for only a couple million years because it was still cooling, and so the temperature was like dropping right, dropping from super crazy hot down to very cold as it is today. So it sort of passed through this window. And after it passed through it, you know, then things would freeze that you couldn't have like liquid water floating out there in the bath of space anymore because it would be too cold. So I think one of the biggest challenges is just like getting it all done within that little window of the habitable epic.
I guess that's true. But if space is big enough, right, and you have this sort of space soup in enough area, that does increase the probability, right, because even though you don't have as much time, you have more stuff to cut, Like you know, you have a billion monkeys typing away at Shakespeare. But if you have like a trillion monkeys typing away at Shakespeare, you can get it done in much less time. And that's how you meet your deadlines exactly.
So you have to sort of imagine a very vast, almost infinite universe to even consider this, and then you have to wonder about how long this kind of life could survive. You know, it's a very radiation intensive time in the universe, lots of photons and X rays and all sorts of stuff banging around that would just tear apart in the delicate structures of most kinds of life. But you know, it's a fun intellectual exercise.
And we do have life on Earth that has some resistance to radiation. Obviously there's a limit to it, but things like tartar grades, the little water bears that are so cute, those microscopical little guys, do have some resistance to radiation. So I could imagine, although extremely unlikely, maybe you have something that, you know, because of these selective pressures of having to survive radiation, it somehow has some protective measures to prevent itself from being just torn apart by little space bullets exactly.
And so while I think it's very unlikely this kind of thing might have happened, I do think it's really worthwhile to push the boundaries of our imagination and wonder how life might form and how it might form differently in different parts of the universe and how long life might have been around. Remember, we are late comers to this Earth and late comers to this universe, and so it could be that we are not the first ones to the party, but we have shown up after all the good snacks have been eaten.
No, Oh, that's the worst thing you've said this whole.
Podcast, which just means we got to make our own snacks.
Hey, there we go. We got to take our universe stardust and make some rice Krispy treats out of it.
Exactly. So thank you very much for listening to us speculate about the very early universe and casting your mind back across this incredible cosmic sweep of history. And thank you Katie for coming along on this journey.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everyone, thanks for listening. Tune in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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