SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
janrinok
on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
AnonTechie writes:
"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 48 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 2, Interesting) by AsteroidMining on Monday March 03 2014, @07:05PM
I assume that a very long lived civilization will also contain very long lived entities. Suppose they have a lifespan of 10^9 years, then spending 100,000 years to get somewhere and come back is comparable to one of us spending 3 days on a trip to LA. The British had a global empire (tougher to do than a civilization) at a time when travel times were months (yes, they lost the US part of it, but kept the rest, at least until communications sped up) and, of course, many civilizations (such as the Chinese) certainly existed at a time when the vast majority of their inhabitants never left their home village.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 03 2014, @07:38PM
Yes, I suppose the ultra-long lifespan thing would make it more feasible. I guess it's pretty hard to think about in human terms, because the idea of waiting even 100 years for a response to a query seems pretty ridiculous even if we had 200+-year lifespans, just because of the speed of our thinking. But remember, it's not just lifespans, it's the speed at which your daily events take place: when the British had to deal with the American colonies declaring independence, travel time was probably only a couple of weeks. It's not like King George had to wait years or decades to learn enough information to decide whether to send troops or not; he had his answer in a month or two. It's still a long time, but not so long you've moved on to other matters and lost interest in the issue.