4 ms·

Something to blow your mind with. The early days in the universe there were millions of years were the average temperature in the universe supported liquid wate

• kaashif 1y ago
  I don't think millions of years is long enough for anything interesting to happen life-wise, is it?
  • vizzier 1y ago
    hard to know with so few data points
    • firefax 1y ago
      >hard to know with so few data points i've yelled at the interns several times but none have been able to set up a haldane soup focus group yet
    • mburns 1y ago
      "insufficient data for meaningful answer", one might say.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    On the one hand, (primitive) life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions allowed it. On the other, the early universe — this particular "warm bath" era — had approximately zero oxygen with which to make water. Right temperature, just (IIRC, but I'm not certain) zero stars yet, so nothing to make things heavier than what came out of Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
• gweinberg 1y ago
  Okay, but this is the average temperature of a big cloud of hydrogen with oxygen yet to be invented right?
  • malfist 1y ago
    We don't really know. Decades ago we would have said yes, the universe was metal poor (metal being any element heavily than hydrogen). But these days the composition of early stars that we can detect have too much metal too early.