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Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All

posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"

 
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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:31PM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:31PM (#10599) Homepage Journal

    - Out-of-control global warming turns Earth into Venus faster than we can adapt.

    So we survive under-ground. Not too hard. We have glass to allow limited light through for growing plants... solar power would still work, and wind-power would have one hell of a ROI.

    - Large asteroid impact a la the dinosaurs 66 millions years ago.

    Nope. Dinosaurs didn't know how to create bomb shelters, or manage the most basic forms of agriculture and teraforming (eg. shading or using green-houses for plants).

    - Neutron star or other giant celestial object swats away the entire planet like it's a flea.

    In the next couple centuries, I'd expect humanity will have self-sustaining colonies on Mars that would survive the loss of Earth.

    - Virus or bacteria. While often there's enough diversity that at least a few members of a species will make it, sometimes there isn't.

    There are extremely isolated pockets of humanity on earth.

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
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