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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.

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marcos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

but it’s cool to imagine a universe where life was incredibly abundant

There was probably nothing but Helium, Hydrogen and a tiny bit of Lithium at that period.

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- panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Those are some of the best elements though.
  
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  - marcos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    They surely are popular…
    
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  - Dicska@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, season 8 of helium is just chef’s kiss.
    
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  - kozy138@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Top 3 probably
    
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engywook@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 (but this theory looks like it came well after SW in 2014).

The actual paper about it: lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/habitable.pdf

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teft@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No because of the inflationary period the universe cooled tremendously fast since it expanded in size so dramatically. A few yottoseconds after the “bang” started the universe was a small sphere around 4x10^-29 meters in diameter and expanded to a sphere of 9 meters diameter. The expansion lasted something like 10^-35 seconds and supercooled the universe. This happened really soon after the hot big bang.

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wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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- SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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
  
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