Life as we know it on earth came about very, very late in the age of the universe. That’s not just fascinating (as facts about the universe generally are), but also highly surprising. That we’re here now seems to be a big fluke. Considering how much humans have evolved in understanding things around us and having the capacity as a species to create larger and coordinated changes, the daily news we see is generally such a huge disappointment. “Squandering” doesn’t even cover what we’re doing to the only planet we can inhabit for now.
> But life’s signatures will not last forever. The prospects for life in the distant future are gloomy. The dark and frigid conditions that will result from the accelerated expansion of the universe by dark energy will likely extinguish all forms of life 10 trillion years from now. Until then, we could cherish the temporary gifts that nature had blessed us with. Our actions will be a source of pride for our descendants if they sustain a civilization intelligent enough to endure for trillions of years.
Let’s hope we’re able to give the gift of wonder and awe to many more generations to come.
Earth orbits a second generation star. So the first generation had to form and live to the end of its sequence before the stellar explosion created the heavier elements that our solar system is made out of. Without that life is very hard to imagine. So a lot of this 'delay' is perfectly natural, life may not have had a chance to emerge much sooner in this particular solar system than it did.
Blue hypergiants only last about 10 million years.
What really is necessary to know, I believe there is still debate, is whether main sequence supernovae can generate all the necessary elements. I believe gold and heavier are might not be possible with normal supernovae and may require neutron star mergers to generate.
I believe earth tectonics, not a small aspect of Earth's long term stability/cycle, need radioactives to maintain a liquid core (not to mention the magnetic shield provided by the core).
Still, an earth like world in a mostly stable/quiet area of a galaxy may be possible only a few billion years after the big bang with some luck with blue hypergiants and a lucky neutron star merger, if that is in fact necessary for heavy elements and radioactives.
The collisions have so much energy that matter (neutronium) is ejected. I believe it might happen in neutron star - black hole mergers too due to the crazy gravitational energy involved.
Anyway, you eject clumps of "pure neutronium" then they will undergo rapid evolution to elements as neutrons decay to protons in order as they try to become stable elements. I'm not a nuclear physicist... I'm not a physicist....
Personally, if neutron star mergers are responsible for most heavy elements, then the "island of stability" above the current transuranics probably doesn't exist, because neutronium would almost certainly traverse those islands as it followed all the different decay chains.
That stability is the physics interpretation of the word stability, where stability could be measured in hours, minutes or even seconds rather than on a timescale where those elements would be present in measurable quantities billions of years later.
Yeah, I guess that there's some (literally !) "golden middle", where the energies involved are high enough to eject some large fraction of the neutronium, while the masses involved aren't high enough to immediately result in a black hole ?
Somewhat relatedly, the article reads like a plea for funding. It's not just an "interesting story", it's an attempt to justify why the story should be further researched:
> Our actions will be a source of pride for our descendants if they sustain a civilization intelligent enough to endure for trillions of years. Here’s hoping that we will act wisely enough to be remembered favorably in their “big history” books.
What if intelligent, self-aware systems existed in the earlier phases of the universe? Would they have understood the changes taking place in the universe, their eventual demise, and taken steps to allow life of a new form to emerge after the universal condensation?
Obviously there is no way of knowing, but it was an amusing thought to consider for a moment.
I would love to read a sci-fi story about organisms that evolved in the early plasma universe and how they used technology to create arks to carry them through the rapidly cooling universe. And then one day an ark filled with primordial plasma passes by Earth and says hi.
> I would love to read a sci-fi story about organisms that evolved in the early plasma universe and how they used technology to create arks to carry them through the rapidly cooling universe. And then one day an ark filled with primordial plasma passes by Earth and says hi.
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee series actually touches on quite a bit of that, but his writing is such that I'd honestly prefer to read it in outline form with the conceptual bits pasted in.
IIRC, the short story "The Quagma Datum" from Vacuum Diagrams deals with that most directly, and is similar the story your asking for, complete with an ark. Also the titular Xeelee are also survivors from the very early universe.
I can't get through Baxter's writing either. Well, I did manage one book and his ideas are grand, such that one keeps thinking about it for a while after reading his stuff.
But I don't know what it is about his writing. It just isn't very gripping.
This opposed to f.e. Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. Similar hard scifi, but much more fun to read.
> I can't get through Baxter's writing either. Well, I did manage one book and his ideas are grand, such that one keeps thinking about it for a while after reading his stuff.
He also reuses his "grand" ideas. For instance, I skimmed Xeelee Redemption because it's apparently the first book where he actually depicted a Xeelee, and a lot of the chapters were rehashes of ideas he'd previously explored (e.g. humans evolving into hive organisms, species surviving environmental destruction by becoming symbiotic composite organisms).
Robert L. Forward wrote a pair of hard sci-fi novels, 'Dragon's Egg' & 'Starquake' about a manned Earth probe that discovers sentient life that evolved in the hot plasma on the surface of a star. I prefer the second more, but both are very good.
Suppose such very early organisms had lived at quantum scale, or across the quantum / classical divide. At around the scale of a virus.
And suppose their replication had entailed production of entangled particles.
Without need for fast travel those particles would now exist everywhere in the universe. Having been carried here by expansion / inflation.
Many of those remnant particles / organisms would still be entangled, having never encountered another particle to cause their collapse.
This allows real-time (unconstrained by FTL) communication with arbitrary places in the universe.
We would communicate with this system using Earth-originated organisms at similar scale, collapsing those early entangled particles and watching the effect on our viruses' e.g. their spin.
Entanglement definitely does not allow FTL communication. IIUC the "wave function collapse" or whatever[0] does happen instantaneously, but you can't get any actual information through it without sending conventional signals as well.
[0] I grow ever more convinced that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense, but it's the easiest language to acknowledge the weirdness of spooky action at a distance.
I like your word choice of “self-aware systems,” as I’m curious if there are other permutations of atoms that can give consciousness. Maybe I’m leaning too heavily into the sci-fi realm though.
Ted Chiang's Exhalation is one of the very best I've read in this vein (also in the GP's sense of "life on different entropic timescales"). Highly recommended if you haven't read it yet.
They could also mean the early, hot universe vs. today. In those hyper-dense conditions, it's possible that something like nucleonic matter could form the complex patterns of life and intelligence, which would proceed many orders of magnitude faster than our own chemical reaction based life and intelligence. (See Robert Forward's "Starquake" books about life on the surface of a neutron star. Those creatures would experience time at millions of times the speed we do.)
Entire eons of civilizations could have arisen and disappeared, with their own "heat death" of the universe from their perspective. At some point, the universe would expand and cool to the point that the form of matter required for their existence would generally cease to exist, destroying everything from their civilization, utterly and completely.
In Roger Penrose's Conformal cyclic cosmology, another universe could arise after the heat death of our own, just at a different scale in time and space, where the cold, thin, red-shifted to oblivion photons left over from our universe would comprise a Big Bang in a far slower, cooler, and vaster universe.
More like the extremely hot early universe, e.g., before the universe became transparent to the cosmic background radiation (<1M years after the Big Bang).
Room temperature does not mean safe for carbon life, I'm sure at a far enough distance from a nuclear reactor's core there's "room temperature".
But at that time, there must have been very few heavy elements so any life must have been "plasma life" and "room temperature" probably was very unpleasant for them.
I don't think you're alone with these thoughts. The absence of evidence of other sentient beings (Fermi paradox IIRC) is an input to the theoretical Great Filter.
EDIT: I misread what you wrote. It's not quite as related. But maybe only a little.
> A complementary strategy is to search for technological signals from early distant civilizations that harnessed enough energy to make them detectable across the vast cosmic scale.
> Communication signals are not expected to be detectable across the universe, because the signal travel time would require billions of years in each direction and no participant would be patient enough to engage in such a slow exchange of information.
So effectively what we could search for is energy pollution from construction and transportation operations. Although it seems obvious in retrospect, it never occurred to me that intentional communication signals would not have the appropriate characteristics to be detectable across vast distances of space and time.
Not as likely, but still fun to speculate about is biological life being a transitory phenomena as Paul Davies (of SETI) postulates. Once you've become a machine civilization (either we build them or upload ourselves and become them), travel at lightspeed becomes possible and so do all kinds of nifty ideas.
Sure, but if all you want is an existence proof, it’s still possibly better because it removes the requirement that whoever made the noise needs to still be there (FSVO “still” given how simultaneity behaves in relatively).
OTOH, also worse because it’s unlikely to be directional, so the output would have to be powerful even compared to the galaxy it’s part of for an intergalactic detection.
We’re not detecting signals from aliens because, in all likelihood, everybody but the Terrans are using quantum entanglement communication for vast distances, and no one’s seriously used radio signals since the time of their great, great, great, great, great, great grandad.
What's the benefit of using QE for communicating that would outweigh its downsides? And if you say "instantaneous communication", you might want to read more about QE :)
Getting entangled particles to both sides of the conversation, maybe there's a way to entangle particles at a distance? I believe current attempts creates entangled photons at one end and sends half of entangled pairs to the other end. Remember that once you "read" from an entangled pair, it becomes "unentangled". Plus photons like to become unentangled along the way!
Literally can do the same thing with unentangled pairs with all the benefits (except one) with none of the downsides! The reason to do so (which is an awesome reason) is secure communication.
> If your TV signals are getting to another star, you’re losing money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren’t buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your electricity bill.
December 23, 1947 : Before that the various chemical information processing machines that were used to bootstrap life where running at roughly 1Hz frequency.
A frequency so slow that the billions of years elapsed since the creation of the universe, used negligible computation power compared to the resources needed for a single second one century later when the simulation had to be halted having exhausted all computational credits.
This is funny, because the universe has so much compute available, every particle spawns a new universe millions of times a second, and it's still nowhere close to running out of compute.
Does it ? It kinds of depend on how you simulate the universe. There are shortcuts. Particles are not fundamental. Information is.
It begs the question : how much information is there in a drop of water ?
Does the algorithm has to simulate every one of the water molecules, or can it adaptively only needs to preserve the macroscopic quantities while preserving the consistency of the microscopic level (aka information conservation).
Most physical phenomenons exhibit some degree of self synchronization, and self similarity, witness of some kind of information redundancy. It happens at all scales of the universe, from particles which self-organize into crystals, spinning rocks coalescing into planets, stars forming black-holes to store information on their surface instead of the volume.
All these physics rules allow huge speed-up in computation, because once a quantity doesn't change, a billion years for a billion stars can go in an instant.
Information is conserved, but information wants to diffuse. That is the cosmic entropic battle which life is fighting.
Life are the computations which can't be shortcutted.
How is “information” in quantum physics different from “information” in the day-to-day language?
I was watching a documentary and I heard about the problem of information does not disappear in the universe. What does this mean. I have a feeling that information in quantum physics has a different meaning but I don’t understand what it is.
Information is the number of bits you need to describe the state of the system.
(You can look at the technical concepts of "Fisher Information" and "conservation of probability", if you want more details for the quantum case)
It's then about, what you want to describe.
In quantum physics you want to describe the full state.
In our world you want to describe statistics about the full state we have access to : the "observables".
Among those statistics there are some quantities which are expected to be conserved and easily accessible.
In our day to day language information is about the value of these quantities, and the number of bits necessary to describe these values, which is a lower bound of the full state uncompressed information.
When we have the full state, the rules of evolution are reversible therefore you cannot lose information,
if you know the full state at any one time, you can know it at any other time in the future or past, it's just a matter of computation to time-evolve the system.
What gets fun is that information can get compressed. Imagine dropping a piece of glass to the floor and it shatters.
Before the shattering it can easily be described as a uniform square of glass, but after, you have to describe the positions of every pieces.
But because the system is deterministic there is the same information before and after : you can describe it simply by stating it's the time-evolution of uniform square of glass at time post-shattering.
But if you want to do some computation on it, you can't always work in compressed form.
You then need to find a suitable representation which allows to perform the computation you need efficiently.
How much will need to be materialized will depend of the rules of your system.
A more interesting paper is Life Before Earth, https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381, analyzing biological complexity and projecting into the past for an origin of 9.7 billion years ago.
> These attempts to explain the presumed origin of life on Earth are strikingly similar to stretching and shrinking of time scales in Biblical Genesis to fit preconceptions (Schroeder, 1990).
The definition of minimal life as a thing with a single nucleotide is weird. If I have to pick an arbitrary number, I'd choose at least 100. (Anyway, with their model they get that when the Earth appeared, "life" had ~10000 nucleotides.)
> In particular, photosynthesis or
chemosynthesis is needed to be independent from organic resources.
It's weird because the current estimation is that photosynthesis appeared like 1000 millions years after the fist cell. So if this article were correct and the initial cells population came from space, they probably would no have photosynthesis.
Whatever existed prior to life probably had life-like qualities, but couldn't fully meet the criteria, e.g., viruses. So even 0 nucleotides could make sense, if this prototypical organism had other features, and at some point, nucleotides arrived later.
When the chains are very small, you can start to hope you are lucky and get the correct one. The ocean has 1.3 * 10^18 m^3 (3.5 * 10^20 gallons). If we assume 1 random DNA chain per cubic meter, that is like 4^30, so it's enough to have all the chains with 30 bases.
(With 1 molecule per cm^3, you get like 10 more bases in locations for random chains.)
It's actually more complicated, because shallow part of the sea or fumes near ocean rigs may have more concentration, and 1 molecule per cubic meter is a very low concentration. Anyway, extrapolating to 1 base is too extreme.
Also, they had a nice fit for DNA based life, and they discuss the RNA World hypothesis, but it's not clear that the fit for DNA can be extrapolated to the RNA or whatever was used before.
(There is a recent paper that propose a mix of RNA and DNA instead of a pure RNA word. We still don't know.)
If there was some life going on in the very fast moving first nanoseconds of the big bang, to them the time where we live in now is probably what they'd call the heath death
I have been kinda interested on how old a civilisation with human like technology could be. That is at what point is there planets with sufficient amounts of heavier elements like Iron and stuff needed for semi-conductors. As with search for radio signals somehow those need to be generated. Further leads to question when such planets cooled enough to have reasonable atmospheres that are not too hot. After all these are some constraints.
On other hand good question is how much faster evolution of more "complex" life could have been.
If life is part of a phase transition of matter, then it is absolutely flourishing everywhere within the universe, which is larger than our minds can grasp.
My favorite thought experiment is imagining a future earth civilization that does check everywhere in the universe and then it finds no signs of life now or in the past.
There's got to be limits to biological and technological evolution.
After all, it took ~billions of years for life to evolve on Earth and we're not immensely different than a monkey or dog.
Also, we have very few genes compared to all other animals, we're like a 7zip of genetic information, each gene coding multiple proteins, a spaghetti dna code that's very good at what it does, but surely it limits evolution.
If there is anything at all to evolve at, intelligence/emotional wise.
What would a human or alien species with an iq of 1000 be able to achieve vs what we can achieve in the exact same Universe?
it took ~billions of years for life to evolve on Earth
~80% of time waiting for Oxygen Catastrophe, which was random (but was result of evolution, nonetheless). It wasn’t like start, billions of years, end. Organisms that we call non-bacteria non-algae are less than a billion years old, roughly.
It is very difficult for us to imagine which would be the abilities of a "more intelligent" alien species.
On the other hand, it is very easy to imagine an alien species that would have the same intelligence as humans, except that its thinking speed would be several orders of magnitude higher, because it would not be limited by the slow velocities of ions in liquids, like in the animal nervous systems.
The interactions between us and such aliens could be like the interactions between a sea star and us, even if they would not have a higher IQ.
Life is an illusion and We do not have any choice in our actions. Just like how the planets and stars do their work, we do ours and makes us no different from non-living things.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for more in-depth discussion here.
"supernatural" is undefined and it's untestable. You start with meaninglessness, and then you're suprised when rational thinkers say they don't believe in the nonsense?
> But life’s signatures will not last forever. The prospects for life in the distant future are gloomy. The dark and frigid conditions that will result from the accelerated expansion of the universe by dark energy will likely extinguish all forms of life 10 trillion years from now. Until then, we could cherish the temporary gifts that nature had blessed us with. Our actions will be a source of pride for our descendants if they sustain a civilization intelligent enough to endure for trillions of years.
Let’s hope we’re able to give the gift of wonder and awe to many more generations to come.