I woke up to a very interesting paper by Gibson, Wickramasinghe, and Schild that appeared on the ArXiv last night and suggests that life most likely developed shortly after the big bang and was then spread throughout the universe. They call this the biological big bang. (And at this point I should say that universe here means the "local universe" that was in casual contact between 2-8 million years after the big bang.)I will show some plots and quotes below, but before I do I want to give the main arguments of the paper:
1. Complex life originating on this earth is very improbable and scientists who believe such a thing are dismissing how unlikely it is.
2. However after the big bang there was a brief period, between 2 and 8 million years after the big bang, where the formation of life becomes highly probable for these reasons:
- The entire universe (not just one planet) was the in the critical temperature range (273-647K) for the formation of water and complex organic molecules like RNA.
- The first supernovas had already by this point ejected the necessary elements and chemical compounds needed for the formation of complex organic molecules.
- The elevated pressure and density of the universe at this stage contributed to very high reaction rates such that extremely unlikely molecules form quickly.
- The elevated pressure and density of the universe at this stage further kept the majority of the universes in constant communication such that a survival of the fittest scenario could play out.
4. Life did not originate on earth but came to this sterile earth from another sector of the universe through these comets and meteors.
5. The fundamental building blocks of life might actually be the same throughout the whole universe. (With the reminder that here I mean the local section in causal contact between 2-8 millions years after the big bang.)
6. There is evidence for extra-tereestrial life.
Now, I'm not a bio-physicist so experts can correct me if any of the above is inaccurate, but I'm pretty sure those are the main ideas and conclusions discussed in the paper.
Quotes and plots for more details:
Gibson et al. starts out with the following questions:
Why should Earth be the only planet with life? Astrophysical spectra show dust clouds dominated by polycyclic- aromatic-hydrocarbons (PAH), strongly indicating that biological processes are commonplace in the Galaxy. The theory of cometary panspermia provides the logical mechanism for distribution of the seeds of life, but how are sufficient numbers of comets and meteors formed? How, when, and where did life begin in the first place, how widely is it distributed, and are life forms likely to be similar everywhere?
To which they respond:
In the present paper we explore aspects of this HGD (hydro-gravitational-dynamics) model in greater detail, suggesting that the conditions within ultra-high pressure interiors of primordial planets at 647K provide optimal conditions for life’s first origin. Given the large cosmological volumes available and the numerous panspermial mechanisms for communication of life templates provided by HGD cosmology, first life most plausibly appeared and was scattered among 10^80 available planetary interiors produced by the big bang in the time period t = 2-8 Myr. We term this period the biological big bang.And here are some plots:
In this above plot they show their timeline of the early universe. Life begins at the "Goldilocks" temperatures and conditions and the necessary DNA/RNA molecules are carried away by comets.
This image is given as evidence for extra terrestrial life like ours. It is an image of "Cyanobacteria fossils observed by Richard Hoover in Orgueil and Murchison meteorites." In their paper they give evidence that the Red Rain organism is extra-terrestrial.
One more choice quote:
First life is assumed to have occurred on Earth since we see life everywhere and are taught to believe no convincing evidence exists for extraterrestrial life. Copernicus convinced the scientific community, and finally even the Vatican, that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and has recently been buried in hallowed ground. However, with respect to living organisms the scientific community remains in a pre-Copernican position, fiercely resisting concepts that DNA and many diseases and possibly antigens on Earth are continuously supplied by extraterrestrial sources. Because life exists profusely on Earth it is assumed that the formation of life must be a rather trivial matter, and that possibly life began spontaneously on this planet in several ways since life has existed from its beginning 4.6 Gyr ago. However, all laboratory attempts to create life have consis- tently failed and all serious attempts to model probabilities suggest they will always fail. Life chemistry is too complex to replicate with present technologies on human-life-time scales.
The standard Earth-based models for the origin of life, inspired by early suggestions of Haldane (1929) and Oparin (1957), are all based upon an unprovable article of faith. Faith comes in by pos- iting the existence of complex chemical pathways that are yet to be discovered, reaction networks that are somehow capable of bridging the difficult gap between chemistry and biology... Fred Hoyle in his classic book and lectures “Frontiers of Astronomy”, Maddox (2003), proposed the entire solar system as a better venue than Earth for the origin of life.So again, if the paper is correct, it appears that life may have originated shortly after the big bang in a "biological big bang" and was then distributed throughout an otherwise sterile universe on planets like our own earth.
Carl H. Gibson, N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, & Rudolph E. Schild (2010). First life in primordial-planet oceans: the biological big bang Submitted to International Journal of Astrobiology. arXiv: 1009.1760v1
