The Habitable Epoch

I'm not quite sure what's going on there. They were not surfacing, so they don't know if it's a changing climate or if they were disturbed somehow. But um, kind of a bummer. But I hope that they get that back because it's an amazing thing. I think it's only one of two places in the world that has that level of bioluminescence. Cool. I mean you get to see other stuff obviously, Yeah, lots of wild horses, um, all

sorts of really cool things. Well, welcome back, thank you, Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome back listeners to outer Space. We've been talking about wanting to hit some more space content because I mean that's part of the DNA of the show and we haven't been there recently, So here we go into space into some big cosmic questions. Yeah, because we've talked about this before, this idea of the goldilocks principle and how Earth is just the perfect place, right,

it's not too hot, not too cold. Um, but what else is going out there in the universe? And we're going to try to get at this idea of you know, the universe is not this dead, you know, void of space. It's actually a living universe. Yeah. You you always end up coming back around to that, that whole scenario. Right. You look out into into space as as much as we can as an individual understand space. You see all

that darkness and uh. And as the saying goes, there's the idea that there's life out there, and there's the idea that there's nothing out there. And both of those ideas are completely mind blowing to think that there is life thinking or just kerdel ng and and and you know, reproducing itself somewhere, or there's just nothing it's just a dead universe. And both of those have a tremendous effect

on you if you stop to really chew them over. Yeah, especially if you add the time element to it because one hand, you could look at you know, some people look at space and the universe and they think of it in futuristic terms. One day we will conquer it. One day we will know more about it. Other people

look at it as a relic. As if you're peering into deep space, you are peering into deep time, and you can reverse engineer time and try to figure out something about how we came into being exactly now, we of course have a humans have an evolving, continuingly evolving understanding of the cosmos. Uh. You go back not even too long ago, in our very brief period of time and as a species in this cosmos, and it is just a very like the briefest little tip of the needle.

Um and uh, and you have our understanding based on basically ancient Babylonia and cosmology, you know, and you have just just very rough ideas about what we are and where we are. You our cosmos was limited by what we could see with the naked eye, and we, inevitably, being self centered as we are, put ourselves at the center. So there's the idea that the Earth was the center of the observable universe, which again was not even that large. Yeah, um.

And a lot of this boils down to the Copernican principle, right, we're talking about the mid undreds when astronomer Nicolas Copernicus said, hey, the Earth is not the center of our solar system, which really was disturbing too many people because that was putting out the question of well, what if we're not the center of it, and God is not the center of it, then who is the center of it? Who's driving this ship? And he introduced the idea of the sun.

He was a heliocentric, the idea that the Sun is the center of things and we are just revolving around it. Now again, based on his limited under understanding, an observation that made perfect sense, and that was a huge step in the right direction, because the Earth is revolving around

the Sun. Yeah. And we've been building on that idea ever since and really sort of expanding out from that and trying to figure out, Okay, so if you know the Earth is not at the center of it, and you know we're revolving around the Sun, and let's move beyond that, let's move beyond our galaxy. Um. And so we're still trying to move toward that. But you had

said something I thought was really interesting. You said that are really our history and our idea of this in terms of deep time is just occupying a space on the tip of a pin, right, And I wanted to mention if you guys haven't already seen this um in Cosmoses, I know exactly where you going. Yes, uh, which is

hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He gives a wonderful explanation of this idea of of really how much time we humans are occupying in deep time, and he takes the entire three thirteen point eight BILLI in the Age of the Universe, and it condenses it down into one year. This is not going to give justice to it, this explanation, So that's why I urge everybody to to check out. I think it's in the first episode. I think towards the latter part of the first episode. Yeah, this graphic

of this calendar this one year. The first second of January one is the Big Bang. In the last second of December thirty one is the present day. And he walks you through this and according to this calendar, all life on Earth only appears within the final week of that year, and humans appear only in the last hour of the last day, and all of our recorded history, from the founding of every religion to the fighting of every war, takes place in the last four seconds of

December thirty one. Yeah, it's crazy, like just to think that even if life on Earth exists only one million more years, say in a million years, something catastrophic happens, then life on Earth was still just this tiny little

blip in in this in this grand time timescape. Now for something, well, that might make you feel sort of divorced from um, from life, but for others, you can look at this deep time and realize that this fabric of um of matter that's helped to create us has always been well, and I have not has always been there, but it's been there for a really, really really long time before and after us, and we all are intertwined

by that. So again, you mentioned that that calendar year, that our entire cosmic history as a calendar year, that calendar year is representing, roughly, based on our current estimates, thirteen point eight billion years of history. That's thirteen point eight billion years from the beginning of the universe as we understanding it to the present day. Yeah, and how do we know this, How can we calculate this? Well, First of all, the universe cannot be younger than the

objects contained within it. So you start to look at the objects. For instance, you look at stars and you begin to measure their mass and their brightness and figure out the lifespan of the start. So you have more massive stars burning faster than their lower mass siblings. And by the way, the more massive, the more brilliant they are, and the easier they are spot So a star ten times as massive assemble burn through its fuel supply in twenty million years, while a star with half the Sun's

mass will last more than twenty billion years. And that gives us a clue, especially when you look at something like globular clusters, which have these similar characteristics, and you know that the oldest one of these globular clusters have stars with ages between eleven and eighteen billion years. All right, So that's that's one set of evidence. It's kind of like trying to figure out what times some guys robbed a bank. You asked one one witness and I think

they went in around five pm. And you ask another and they say, I think they went around on five pin. And then you sort of compare the notes. Well, one uh, one witness here is saying, I think it was it has to be about an eleven and team billion years based on the the age of these globular customers. Yeah, that there's one clue that kind of gets us in striking distance. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more about why people have you know, the general consensus of

their team point eight billion years in a second. But we have to kind of go even further back into the path before we can do that, and we've got to talk about this fog at the beginning of time. And in order to do that, you got to talk about the Big Bang. Yes, Now, big Bang, of course is is the big theory about how the universe came to be and what the basically what the universe is

really very straightforward a manner. Uh. Then the main opposition to this was historically the steady state theory, and that's the idea of the universe has always existed and therefore it's always existed in the same density and then will make more sense in a minute. But we're talking about the Big Bang here, so there is no before the

Big Bang. That's important to note. There is no outside the Big Bang, the Big Bang, to to go back to the beginning of of of history, to go back to the beginning of that that calendar year that we talked about, to come to a moment when all matters of singularity, and since all matters of singularity, all times of singularity, the single point, yes, a single point of time, a single point of of matter. It's it's it's almost

almost impossible to comprehend. It's such a foreign and even though it's very small, it's such an immense idea that time and space, everything is down to this, the smallest point possible. And it's just kind of like my brain almost breaks trying because I want to place my understanding of it in a in a system of time, because I exist in time and it's the only way I

can understand things. And this is something that that is wrapped in time and and and it's part of its compression, and it was outside of time at one point, right And when you're talking about that pin point, you're talking

about this tiny pin point of energy. Um. This description is from Nola Taylor Red writing for space dot Com, and she says, when the universe was just ten thirty four of a second, or so old that that is, by the way, a hundreds of a billions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and age it experienced a huge burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.

And during this period the universe doubled in size at least ninety times, going from okay, that that pinpoint, that sub atomic size pinpoint to a golf ball size uh ball of energy almost instantaneously. And she says that after inflation, the growth of the universe continued, but it is slower rate.

And then as space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed, and one second after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with neutrons, protons, electrons and anti electrons, photons and neutrinos. And this is really this is where it gets very interesting. She talked about how during the first three minutes of the universe, light elements were born during a process noon as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and for three hundred eighty thousand years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for

this light to shine. So you have that heat of creation smashing atoms together with enough force to break them up into this dense plasma soup of protons and neutrons and electrons, and that's scattered like fog. That's the fog of the beginning of time. That's pretty crazy. Uh, it's no real response to that. So here we are, roughly three seventy eight thousand years after the Big Bang. Like you said, everything has been this this hot mess for ages. That's a good way today. And uh, and there's and

there's not much that can really happen there. It's just everything is kind of I mean, I hate to use the word chaos, but it's kind of a chaotic state. But then the universe cools to about five thousand degrees fahrenheit or kelvin. And this is a crucial because this is cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into hydrogen atoms, and it also releases photons, making up the

radiation that we come to know as the cosmic microwave background. Yeah, that recombination era sets lusa's first flashes of light that were created during the Big Bank. So now they are detectable in the form of cosmic wave background radiation. Why is this important, Well, it's important for so many reasons. But one is that it helps to support the big bank theory, the fact that this is detectable right the

second witness exactly Um. The other thing is that it allows us to again get a bigger um take on what was happening in the universe. That gives us a chance to reverse engineer the timeline. And it's been measured with NASA's Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe and the European Space Agencies plank spacecraft, and so they've looked at this radiation leftover from the Big Bang and they can look at the density, the composition, and the expansion rate of the

verse as a result. And in two twelve W M. A. P. They said, Hm, we think that, you know, looking at the different data here, that the universe is probably about thirteen points seven seven two billion years old. Then you have the plank Um spacecraft that says we're looking at thirteen point eight two billion years and that's where you come into this idea of all, right, the consensus is

thirteen point eight billion years old the universe is. And again it's on one hand, we were looking at the age of the items in the universe and here we're looking at the rate of expansion and how big it is and what the cosmic microwave background is telling us. Yeah, and so okay, this is all important. Why because it gives us a little bit more data to work with and we'll talk about this in a second. Because you start to look at the universe in a different way.

It wasn't just this you know, static thing that's always been existing. There were dynamic changes and as a result, it kind of up ends this idea of the Goldilocks theory, this idea that you have to have the absolute perfect

conditions for life to occur. Because if you look again at our solar system, you look at Earth, that's the bed that Goldilocks is going to bed down in, right, because you've got sustainable water sources that are pretty you know, solid in terms of staying regular um, particularly when you look at the distance the Sun is from the Earth. Right. But if you look at something like Mercury, which is

closest super hot, that's not gonna work. But if you look at Neptune super cold, or just if you're feeling nostalgic, if you look at Pluto super cold. Um, that's what we normally have thought about. We've thought, Okay, Earth is really special because life has happened here against what seems like all odds. But when we get back from this break, we're going to talk about this idea that life could be more playful than we think, and perhaps even before

Earth was even formed. All right, we're back, and you know it's it's important to to stress again that that we used to live in in a time where we have this geocentric fallacy where we thought that the Earth

was the center of things. But when you get into this Goldilocks scenario, you you get close to falling into another type of geocentric fallacy because you get your again stressing the idea that Earth is special, that the life on Earth is special, and by virtue of that, humans are special as the as the primary evolved intelligent speechies, and therefore I am special, right, and we are all

special to a degree. But if you look into deep space, if you look into deep time, then you start to look at this thing called the habitable epic, and we're talking about is for millions of years after the Big Bang, the universe was in a kind of interim state between lumpy gas and the cool galaxy. Suddenly studied darkness that we see today when we look up at the night sky. Uh, there were no galaxies at the time, only large stars,

probably embedded in dark matter. So along come someone named Abraham Lobe, and he is an astrophysicist at Harvard University, and he says, hey, we can do simulations of these early years, and what people find is that there were tens hundreds of times more massive stars than the Sun, and these giant stars floating alone could have had rocky worlds like Earth in orbit around them. And this is where the idea of a habital epoch occurred, after the Big Bang, but before life on Earth. So what does

Lobe do. He puts together a couple of calculations here. Yeah, and the craziest one here is that, Okay, today, the temperature of that relic radiation we're talking about that that that CNB, that cosmic microwave background is just about two point seven calvin calvin. But at an age about the fifteen million years ago that we're talking about here, it would have kept the entire universe at three hundred degrees kelvin. So we're talking about heating emerging from that that cosmic

microwave background. Yeah, and again, this is just a blip in the eye of time. It's fifteen million years after the Big Bang. But any existing planets at that time would have been in that habitable habitable zone, as you say, Goldilocks hair would have had numerous beds to get into because the universe was still bathed in that warm gas from the cosmic microwave background, but it had cooled down, so you would have liquid on these planets or you know,

no matter where they were in relation to a star. Yes, which is huge because liquid water is the one of the building blocks of life. Exactly. One of the things we look for when we look out and sit and think is this is this exoplanet capable of theoretically supporting life. Yep, there would be energy to kick start life forms. You have your liquid water which was slashed around the surface

of planets with atmosphere. Now, as Load points out, this would be a very weird time for life to evolve anywhere because many of the building blocks of life on Earth, like carbon and metals, uh, they only exist because we have these massive cellar explosions, we have the supernovast that so you know, we're all star stuff. And there was

a lot of star stuff to go around. Because this is early in the universe, they haven't been many stars to die and uh and and this would have been an age where most of the elements on the periodic table didn't even exist yet, so you had fewer building blocks to build things. But it's kind of like if if you're really into Legos and then you find the building blocks, be they Legos or some other brand that like your father or an older sibling had to think,

how did they build anything? They didn't have those little wheelie dus or the little rotating things, and I only had the colored blocks. It seems like you would be you would be very limited in what you could construct. Uh and and Yes, that's one of the crazy things about this is trying to imagine what would what what would life on one of these worlds have been like that, you know, would it what kind of form would it

have taken? Yeah, it's kind of funny because Lope says, if you think about it right now, you look up into the night sky and you see all these galaxies and you see all those stars shining um and that's that's sort of you know, our people out there. But this would have been an isolated a lonely kind of life with as you say, just a couple of lego parts, um, would it have borne out intelligent life? Probably not um.

Alexander villen Kin as a cosmologist at Touch University in Medford, Massachusetts, and he says that a few million years in this habitable epic is too short of time to produce intelligent life because if you think about humans and how long it took for us and all the building blocks before us to create, um, the sort of complex intelligence that we have as four point five billion years of history on Earth and uh, that's about three point five billion

years of those in which life has been wriggling around our planet. But Lobe says, Hey, when I'm talking about life taking ape here, I'm not talking about intelligent life.

I'm talking about simple life forms like allergy. Yeah. Now another thing to keep in mind too, One another thing that works in the advantage of this, uh, this theoretical early life would be that that same the same isolation that they that they had would also protect them from cosmic radiation, asteroid bombardments, and other things that could conceivably snuff out life before it even you know, got going to any degree that mattered. That's true. Um, even though

it have been isolated and lonely. You're right, some of those elements that might have impacted them greatly them or whatever life, what a reform that might have taken on some of those early planets wouldn't have been completely wiped out by an asteroid. Now, some of you may be wondering at this point, Okay, well what you know? That's that's interesting to think that there was this this early epic in which in which very primitive life could have

evolved and then and then perished. But how does that affect the current scenario. It's like saying, oh, well, you know, once long ago this happened, but but how does that affect the present? Well? Ultimately, uh, what Loabs really pushing about this idea is that it makes us have to rethink what life could be like out there now, and it changes the equation to a certain degree about life in the universe as a whole, not just in in ancient times, in an early epoch, but even in our

current epoch. That's right. That recast the idea of the universe as a living universe, not a dead universe. Um, it doesn't make Earth feel so lonely in the sense that perhaps it's the only planet that has ever experienced some sort of life form on it. Also, it brings into the question this idea of if we know this, just this fraction of information about the universe's history, what else is out there to support the idea that um somewhere and you know, buildings and billions and billions of

light years away that we can't even measure. Is there another planet that could sustain life currently? Is it in the near future, has it been in the past, Yeah, it's And we're gonna we're gonna resist the temptation to google go too far into the deep end on this one.

But but that you really have to then think about all the various forms life can take without even getting into the the idea of intelligent life, because then you have to you have to stop and think, well, what is what is what is it we call intelligent life? Is it? This? Is it self consciousness? And so how many different types of conscious consciousness exist for for some sort of organic being. How many different versions of time

perception exists from an organic being? I mean, we we spent a lot of time on this show, uh dismantling human perception. Uh, and and you and as you just mantle it and you you can imagine, just like a car, if you take all the pieces apart, and if you try to put them back together in varying ways, like think of all the different ways you could reassemble some version of intelligent life on another world. And those are

just the ones we can possibly conceive of. Oh yeah, I mean there's a couple of ways to go at this if we really wanted to fall down the rabbit hole. And one is just from a chemical chemical perspect that we could say, well, you know, we're carbon biased. We think that only life forms can can start with carbon, But could there be another configuration that we're not aware of?

Probably not, but that's one argument. Another is that some people will say, um, you know, there's this anthropic principle, this idea that life here exists on Earth only because it's observable to us. Therefore, life does not exist outside of the Earth because it cannot be observed or you know, there maybe or not life forms that can observe their selves or themselves rather. But that one's really sticky territory to get into as well, because again you're you're talking

about ideas of consciousness and what is consciousness? And then what degree is any kind of intelligent life going to destroy itself? To what extent is any form of intelligent life going to eradicate other forms of life and its vicinity? And then we sort of fall back into that whole uh Goldilocks affair where we're again basing our understanding on what intelligent life can be based on the only model we have, and we have to depend on the only model we have. But but then we can't help that

but have our expectations colored by that. No, but you know what makes me feel for it's warm and cuddling cosmic microwave background. That too, I'd like to think of it just cooking me passively kidding. Uh. The Voyager one, because it's out there, that probe that was launched in seventy seven and seven along with Voyager two. We know last year that it left our Solar System and it's in interstellar space still giving us data. But you know,

it's kind of getting weak right now. It is the the human sharpie on the bathroom of the universe, that is in which we have written humans was here. I like that. Yeah, that's because it has the gold album on it right exactly, which contains about of different sort of audio ephemera of life on earth. So you have like a baby crying the sound of a kiss. You also have images on there just in case someone intercepts

it about billion years from now. All right, well that note, let's call the robot over here for just one quick listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from Brandon Brandon Rights, and it says, Hi, Robert and Julie. My name is Brandon, and I'm a huge stuff to blow your mind fan, keep up the great work. I just listened to your brain hacking podcasts on habits. Something you said in the podcast struck me, and so I

decided to write this email. You mentioned something about taking a vacation as being a good way to break bad habits. This is very true for me. I'm terrible with biting my nails, and I'm constantly trying to stop. At the end of last year, I traveled to Europe with my sister for two weeks. When I got home, I realized I had not bitten a single nail once. I was completely stunned. I had not even thought about the entire

time about it. The entire time I was overseats. Simply being in a new environment and doing new things was enough to help break my old habit without much effort on my part. To day after I got home, though, I immediately noticed it was once again a struggle to not by my nails, and I had to really try hard to stop myself from doing it subconsciously. Just some interesting tidbits I experience, and I thought I would share

love from South Africa. Brandon, all right, Yeah, I noticed that team when I was on vacation, that I wasn't checking my phone every two seconds, because you know, you've got that compulsion. And I finally kind of broke free of that. And the funny thing about this, my husband is always making fun of my virgin mobile phone because he has an shiny iPhone. But it worked brilliantly in via case, and I think that's because Sir Richard Branson has Neckro Island nearby, and I gotta think that the

network there is pretty strong. What's it called Necro Island? Now you were getting all like Necro what Branson? There? No no Necker. I think about his necking because it's Branson. For some reason, I think of him as always necking. He's always happy looking, so he looks, you know, just tanned and like he's living the good life with a robot wireless network in the islands. All right, well there you go. UM, hey, you wanna check in with us? You want to share your thoughts about the habitable epic?

How does that change your understanding of the cosmos? Your thoughts on the cosmos? UH? In regards to reality or even science fiction? What do you think extress real life might consist of? All these questions are valid, We'd love to hear from you. UH. There are number ways to get in touch with us. UH. The best is just simply to go to stuff to Bow your Mind dot com. That is the way to get a a strong dosage

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