cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/44126927
Goldilocks
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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If that blows your mind then think about this: As the universe expanded after the Big Bang, it cooled from unimaginably high temperatures. In principle, this suggest that there could have been a very short window much later, tens of millions of years after the Big Bang, when the background temperature of the entire universe was capable of sustaining life everywhere. Some physicists have suggested this might have created a brief, universe-wide “habitable epoch,” though this remains theoretical.
I'm not an expert, so this is probably not a muture understanding, but it's cool to imagine a universe where life was incredibly abundant.
I'm skeptical of this. Life doesn't just need a certain temperature, it needs to convert lower entropy energy to higher entropy. A uniform environment temperature does not provide any usable energy. You would still need a star or some other energy source.
It also needs something that can form complex molecules. The lightest element we know of that can form these is carbon. That didn't appear in reasonable quantities until the first stars exploded.
There was probably nothing but helium, hydrogen and a tiny bit of lithium at that period.
Those are some of the best elements though.
They surely are popular...
Top 3 probably
Yeah, season 8 of helium is just chef's kiss.
Well, "life as we know it". But for all we know energy rather than matter-based beings could have existed more readily back then, and perhaps struggle to exist now under lower density conditions. Thereby making that earlier era more habitable for their type of life, even as our current era is more habitable for our own type.
Interesting theory, I'd never heard of it before. All of the sudden, "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away", actually seems plausible (although this theory looks like it came well after SW in 2014).
The actual paper about it: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/habitable.pdf
More weird to me is that, at some point before the first stars, the entire universe glowed through the entire rainbow, so there is a moment when, were you to travel back in time, the entire universe would glow blindingly green.
It probably would never appear green, due to the black-body radiation distribution. When the peak is at green, it just looks like white to us. Our sun is kinda a "green" star due to this
But it would go from blue to white to red. Similar colour progression that we can find in the distribution of stars
Indeed! Good point! For some reason, I was under the impression that the CMB was monochromatic (corresponding to a red shifted equivalent of the precise energy of W and Z boson annihilation to produce photons). Thanks!!