April 24, 2014 • 28 mins
The Habitable Epoch: What if we're wrong. What if life isn't a rarity in a dead cosmos, but rather a common occurrence in the habitable epoch 10 to 20 million years after the Big Bang? Explore the mind-blowing possibility with Robert and Julie.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julia
Lee Douglas. Julie, welcome back from vacation. Where did you go?
I went to Via Keys. It's a small island right
outside of Puerto Rico. I went to go see bioluminescent Bay. Yeah. Yeah,
(00:27):
with a microplankton that blows. Unfortunately, and they don't know.
I'm not quite sure what's going on there. They were
not surfacing, so they don't know if it's a changing
climate or if they were disturbed somehow. But um, kind
of a bummer. But I hope that they get that
back because it's an amazing thing. I think it's only
one of two places in the world that has that
(00:48):
level of bioluminescence. Cool. I mean you get to see
other stuff obviously, Yeah, lots of wild horses, um, all
sorts of really cool things. Well, welcome back, thank you,
Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome back listeners to
outer Space. We've been talking about wanting to hit some
more space content because I mean that's part of the
DNA of the show and we haven't been there recently,
(01:09):
So here we go into space into some big cosmic questions. Yeah,
because we've talked about this before, this idea of the
goldilocks principle and how Earth is just the perfect place, right,
it's not too hot, not too cold. Um, but what
else is going out there in the universe? And we're
going to try to get at this idea of you know,
(01:30):
the universe is not this dead, you know, void of space.
It's actually a living universe. Yeah. You you always end
up coming back around to that, that whole scenario. Right.
You look out into into space as as much as
we can as an individual understand space. You see all
that darkness and uh. And as the saying goes, there's
the idea that there's life out there, and there's the
(01:52):
idea that there's nothing out there. And both of those
ideas are completely mind blowing to think that there is
life thinking or just kerdel ng and and and you know,
reproducing itself somewhere, or there's just nothing it's just a
dead universe. And both of those have a tremendous effect
on you if you stop to really chew them over. Yeah,
especially if you add the time element to it because
(02:14):
one hand, you could look at you know, some people
look at space and the universe and they think of
it in futuristic terms. One day we will conquer it.
One day we will know more about it. Other people
look at it as a relic. As if you're peering
into deep space, you are peering into deep time, and
you can reverse engineer time and try to figure out
something about how we came into being exactly now, we
(02:36):
of course have a humans have an evolving, continuingly evolving
understanding of the cosmos. Uh. You go back not even
too long ago, in our very brief period of time
and as a species in this cosmos, and it is
just a very like the briefest little tip of the needle.
Um and uh, and you have our understanding based on
(02:58):
basically ancient Babylonia and cosmology, you know, and you have
just just very rough ideas about what we are and
where we are. You our cosmos was limited by what
we could see with the naked eye, and we, inevitably,
being self centered as we are, put ourselves at the center.
So there's the idea that the Earth was the center
of the observable universe, which again was not even that large. Yeah, um.
(03:22):
And a lot of this boils down to the Copernican principle, right,
we're talking about the mid undreds when astronomer Nicolas Copernicus said, hey,
the Earth is not the center of our solar system,
which really was disturbing too many people because that was
putting out the question of well, what if we're not
(03:43):
the center of it, and God is not the center
of it, then who is the center of it? Who's
driving this ship? And he introduced the idea of the sun.
He was a heliocentric, the idea that the Sun is
the center of things and we are just revolving around it.
Now again, based on his limited under understanding, an observation
that made perfect sense, and that was a huge step
in the right direction, because the Earth is revolving around
(04:04):
the Sun. Yeah. And we've been building on that idea
ever since and really sort of expanding out from that
and trying to figure out, Okay, so if you know
the Earth is not at the center of it, and
you know we're revolving around the Sun, and let's move
beyond that, let's move beyond our galaxy. Um. And so
we're still trying to move toward that. But you had
(04:25):
said something I thought was really interesting. You said that
are really our history and our idea of this in
terms of deep time is just occupying a space on
the tip of a pin, right, And I wanted to
mention if you guys haven't already seen this um in Cosmoses,
I know exactly where you going. Yes, uh, which is
hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He gives a wonderful explanation
(04:49):
of this idea of of really how much time we
humans are occupying in deep time, and he takes the
entire three thirteen point eight BILLI in the Age of
the Universe, and it condenses it down into one year.
This is not going to give justice to it, this explanation,
So that's why I urge everybody to to check out.
I think it's in the first episode. I think towards
(05:12):
the latter part of the first episode. Yeah, this graphic
of this calendar this one year. The first second of
January one is the Big Bang. In the last second
of December thirty one is the present day. And he
walks you through this and according to this calendar, all
life on Earth only appears within the final week of
that year, and humans appear only in the last hour
(05:32):
of the last day, and all of our recorded history,
from the founding of every religion to the fighting of
every war, takes place in the last four seconds of
December thirty one. Yeah, it's crazy, like just to think
that even if life on Earth exists only one million
more years, say in a million years, something catastrophic happens,
then life on Earth was still just this tiny little
(05:55):
blip in in this in this grand time timescape. Now
for something, well, that might make you feel sort of
divorced from um, from life, but for others, you can
look at this deep time and realize that this fabric
of um of matter that's helped to create us has
always been well, and I have not has always been there,
(06:18):
but it's been there for a really, really really long
time before and after us, and we all are intertwined
by that. So again, you mentioned that that calendar year,
that our entire cosmic history as a calendar year, that
calendar year is representing, roughly, based on our current estimates,
thirteen point eight billion years of history. That's thirteen point
(06:39):
eight billion years from the beginning of the universe as
we understanding it to the present day. Yeah, and how
do we know this, How can we calculate this? Well,
First of all, the universe cannot be younger than the
objects contained within it. So you start to look at
the objects. For instance, you look at stars and you
begin to measure their mass and their brightness and figure
out the lifespan of the start. So you have more
(07:02):
massive stars burning faster than their lower mass siblings. And
by the way, the more massive, the more brilliant they are,
and the easier they are spot So a star ten
times as massive assemble burn through its fuel supply in
twenty million years, while a star with half the Sun's
mass will last more than twenty billion years. And that
(07:24):
gives us a clue, especially when you look at something
like globular clusters, which have these similar characteristics, and you
know that the oldest one of these globular clusters have
stars with ages between eleven and eighteen billion years. All right,
So that's that's one set of evidence. It's kind of
like trying to figure out what times some guys robbed
(07:45):
a bank. You asked one one witness and I think
they went in around five pm. And you ask another
and they say, I think they went around on five pin.
And then you sort of compare the notes. Well, one uh,
one witness here is saying, I think it was it
has to be about an eleven and team billion years
based on the the age of these globular customers. Yeah,
that there's one clue that kind of gets us in
(08:05):
striking distance. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more
about why people have you know, the general consensus of
their team point eight billion years in a second. But
we have to kind of go even further back into
the path before we can do that, and we've got
to talk about this fog at the beginning of time.
And in order to do that, you got to talk
about the Big Bang. Yes, Now, big Bang, of course
(08:27):
is is the big theory about how the universe came
to be and what the basically what the universe is
really very straightforward a manner. Uh. Then the main opposition
to this was historically the steady state theory, and that's
the idea of the universe has always existed and therefore
(08:48):
it's always existed in the same density and then will
make more sense in a minute. But we're talking about
the Big Bang here, so there is no before the
Big Bang. That's important to note. There is no outside
the Big Bang, the Big Bang, to to go back
to the beginning of of of history, to go back
to the beginning of that that calendar year that we
talked about, to come to a moment when all matters
(09:08):
of singularity, and since all matters of singularity, all times
of singularity, the single point, yes, a single point of time,
a single point of of matter. It's it's it's almost
almost impossible to comprehend. It's such a foreign and even
though it's very small, it's such an immense idea that
(09:28):
time and space, everything is down to this, the smallest
point possible. And it's just kind of like my brain
almost breaks trying because I want to place my understanding
of it in a in a system of time, because
I exist in time and it's the only way I
can understand things. And this is something that that is
wrapped in time and and and it's part of its compression,
(09:48):
and it was outside of time at one point, right
And when you're talking about that pin point, you're talking
about this tiny pin point of energy. Um. This description
is from Nola Taylor Red writing for space dot Com,
and she says, when the universe was just ten thirty
four of a second, or so old that that is,
by the way, a hundreds of a billions of a
(10:09):
trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and age it
experienced a huge burst of expansion known as inflation, in
which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
And during this period the universe doubled in size at
least ninety times, going from okay, that that pinpoint, that
sub atomic size pinpoint to a golf ball size uh
(10:32):
ball of energy almost instantaneously. And she says that after inflation,
the growth of the universe continued, but it is slower rate.
And then as space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed,
and one second after the Big Bang, the universe was
filled with neutrons, protons, electrons and anti electrons, photons and neutrinos.
(10:54):
And this is really this is where it gets very interesting.
She talked about how during the first three minutes of
the universe, light elements were born during a process noon
as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and for three hundred eighty thousand
years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for
this light to shine. So you have that heat of
(11:14):
creation smashing atoms together with enough force to break them
up into this dense plasma soup of protons and neutrons
and electrons, and that's scattered like fog. That's the fog
of the beginning of time. That's pretty crazy. Uh, it's
no real response to that. So here we are, roughly
three seventy eight thousand years after the Big Bang. Like
(11:36):
you said, everything has been this this hot mess for ages.
That's a good way today. And uh, and there's and
there's not much that can really happen there. It's just
everything is kind of I mean, I hate to use
the word chaos, but it's kind of a chaotic state.
But then the universe cools to about five thousand degrees
fahrenheit or kelvin. And this is a crucial because this
(11:56):
is cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into
hydrogen atoms, and it also releases photons, making up the
radiation that we come to know as the cosmic microwave background. Yeah,
that recombination era sets lusa's first flashes of light that
were created during the Big Bank. So now they are
(12:18):
detectable in the form of cosmic wave background radiation. Why
is this important, Well, it's important for so many reasons.
But one is that it helps to support the big
bank theory, the fact that this is detectable right the
second witness exactly Um. The other thing is that it
allows us to again get a bigger um take on
(12:38):
what was happening in the universe. That gives us a
chance to reverse engineer the timeline. And it's been measured
with NASA's Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe and the European Space
Agencies plank spacecraft, and so they've looked at this radiation
leftover from the Big Bang and they can look at
the density, the composition, and the expansion rate of the
(13:00):
verse as a result. And in two twelve W M. A. P.
They said, Hm, we think that, you know, looking at
the different data here, that the universe is probably about
thirteen points seven seven two billion years old. Then you
have the plank Um spacecraft that says we're looking at
thirteen point eight two billion years and that's where you
(13:20):
come into this idea of all, right, the consensus is
thirteen point eight billion years old the universe is. And
again it's on one hand, we were looking at the
age of the items in the universe and here we're
looking at the rate of expansion and how big it
is and what the cosmic microwave background is telling us. Yeah,
and so okay, this is all important. Why because it
(13:44):
gives us a little bit more data to work with
and we'll talk about this in a second. Because you
start to look at the universe in a different way.
It wasn't just this you know, static thing that's always
been existing. There were dynamic changes and as a result,
it kind of up ends this idea of the Goldilocks theory,
this idea that you have to have the absolute perfect
(14:04):
conditions for life to occur. Because if you look again
at our solar system, you look at Earth, that's the
bed that Goldilocks is going to bed down in, right,
because you've got sustainable water sources that are pretty you know,
solid in terms of staying regular um, particularly when you
look at the distance the Sun is from the Earth. Right.
(14:27):
But if you look at something like Mercury, which is
closest super hot, that's not gonna work. But if you
look at Neptune super cold, or just if you're feeling nostalgic,
if you look at Pluto super cold. Um, that's what
we normally have thought about. We've thought, Okay, Earth is
really special because life has happened here against what seems
like all odds. But when we get back from this break,
(14:48):
we're going to talk about this idea that life could
be more playful than we think, and perhaps even before
Earth was even formed. All right, we're back, and you
know it's it's important to to stress again that that
(15:10):
we used to live in in a time where we
have this geocentric fallacy where we thought that the Earth
was the center of things. But when you get into
this Goldilocks scenario, you you get close to falling into
another type of geocentric fallacy because you get your again
stressing the idea that Earth is special, that the life
on Earth is special, and by virtue of that, humans
are special as the as the primary evolved intelligent speechies,
(15:33):
and therefore I am special, right, and we are all
special to a degree. But if you look into deep space,
if you look into deep time, then you start to
look at this thing called the habitable epic, and we're
talking about is for millions of years after the Big Bang,
the universe was in a kind of interim state between
(15:54):
lumpy gas and the cool galaxy. Suddenly studied darkness that
we see today when we look up at the night sky. Uh,
there were no galaxies at the time, only large stars,
probably embedded in dark matter. So along come someone named
Abraham Lobe, and he is an astrophysicist at Harvard University,
and he says, hey, we can do simulations of these
(16:14):
early years, and what people find is that there were
tens hundreds of times more massive stars than the Sun,
and these giant stars floating alone could have had rocky
worlds like Earth in orbit around them. And this is
where the idea of a habital epoch occurred, after the
Big Bang, but before life on Earth. So what does
(16:37):
Lobe do. He puts together a couple of calculations here. Yeah,
and the craziest one here is that, Okay, today, the
temperature of that relic radiation we're talking about that that
that CNB, that cosmic microwave background is just about two
point seven calvin calvin. But at an age about the
fifteen million years ago that we're talking about here, it
(16:57):
would have kept the entire universe at three hundred degrees kelvin.
So we're talking about heating emerging from that that cosmic
microwave background. Yeah, and again, this is just a blip
in the eye of time. It's fifteen million years after
the Big Bang. But any existing planets at that time
would have been in that habitable habitable zone, as you say,
(17:19):
Goldilocks hair would have had numerous beds to get into
because the universe was still bathed in that warm gas
from the cosmic microwave background, but it had cooled down,
so you would have liquid on these planets or you know,
no matter where they were in relation to a star. Yes,
which is huge because liquid water is the one of
(17:41):
the building blocks of life. Exactly. One of the things
we look for when we look out and sit and
think is this is this exoplanet capable of theoretically supporting life. Yep,
there would be energy to kick start life forms. You
have your liquid water which was slashed around the surface
of planets with atmosphere. Now, as Load points out, this
would be a very weird time for life to evolve
(18:02):
anywhere because many of the building blocks of life on Earth,
like carbon and metals, uh, they only exist because we
have these massive cellar explosions, we have the supernovast that
so you know, we're all star stuff. And there was
a lot of star stuff to go around. Because this
is early in the universe, they haven't been many stars
to die and uh and and this would have been
an age where most of the elements on the periodic
(18:23):
table didn't even exist yet, so you had fewer building
blocks to build things. But it's kind of like if
if you're really into Legos and then you find the
building blocks, be they Legos or some other brand that
like your father or an older sibling had to think,
how did they build anything? They didn't have those little
wheelie dus or the little rotating things, and I only
had the colored blocks. It seems like you would be
(18:46):
you would be very limited in what you could construct.
Uh and and Yes, that's one of the crazy things
about this is trying to imagine what would what what
would life on one of these worlds have been like that,
you know, would it what kind of form would it
have taken? Yeah, it's kind of funny because Lope says,
if you think about it right now, you look up
into the night sky and you see all these galaxies
and you see all those stars shining um and that's
(19:08):
that's sort of you know, our people out there. But
this would have been an isolated a lonely kind of
life with as you say, just a couple of lego parts, um,
would it have borne out intelligent life? Probably not um.
Alexander villen Kin as a cosmologist at Touch University in Medford, Massachusetts,
and he says that a few million years in this
(19:30):
habitable epic is too short of time to produce intelligent
life because if you think about humans and how long
it took for us and all the building blocks before
us to create, um, the sort of complex intelligence that
we have as four point five billion years of history
on Earth and uh, that's about three point five billion
(19:51):
years of those in which life has been wriggling around
our planet. But Lobe says, Hey, when I'm talking about
life taking ape here, I'm not talking about intelligent life.
I'm talking about simple life forms like allergy. Yeah. Now
another thing to keep in mind too, One another thing
that works in the advantage of this, uh, this theoretical
early life would be that that same the same isolation
(20:13):
that they that they had would also protect them from
cosmic radiation, asteroid bombardments, and other things that could conceivably
snuff out life before it even you know, got going
to any degree that mattered. That's true. Um, even though
it have been isolated and lonely. You're right, some of
those elements that might have impacted them greatly them or
whatever life, what a reform that might have taken on
(20:35):
some of those early planets wouldn't have been completely wiped
out by an asteroid. Now, some of you may be
wondering at this point, Okay, well what you know? That's
that's interesting to think that there was this this early
epic in which in which very primitive life could have
evolved and then and then perished. But how does that
affect the current scenario. It's like saying, oh, well, you know,
once long ago this happened, but but how does that
(20:57):
affect the present? Well? Ultimately, uh, what Loabs really pushing
about this idea is that it makes us have to
rethink what life could be like out there now, and
it changes the equation to a certain degree about life
in the universe as a whole, not just in in
ancient times, in an early epoch, but even in our
current epoch. That's right. That recast the idea of the
(21:18):
universe as a living universe, not a dead universe. Um,
it doesn't make Earth feel so lonely in the sense
that perhaps it's the only planet that has ever experienced
some sort of life form on it. Also, it brings
into the question this idea of if we know this,
just this fraction of information about the universe's history, what
(21:41):
else is out there to support the idea that um
somewhere and you know, buildings and billions and billions of
light years away that we can't even measure. Is there
another planet that could sustain life currently? Is it in
the near future, has it been in the past, Yeah,
(22:01):
it's And we're gonna we're gonna resist the temptation to
google go too far into the deep end on this one.
But but that you really have to then think about
all the various forms life can take without even getting
into the the idea of intelligent life, because then you
have to you have to stop and think, well, what
is what is what is it we call intelligent life?
Is it? This? Is it self consciousness? And so how
(22:22):
many different types of conscious consciousness exist for for some
sort of organic being. How many different versions of time
perception exists from an organic being? I mean, we we
spent a lot of time on this show, uh dismantling
human perception. Uh, and and you and as you just
mantle it and you you can imagine, just like a car,
if you take all the pieces apart, and if you
(22:42):
try to put them back together in varying ways, like
think of all the different ways you could reassemble some
version of intelligent life on another world. And those are
just the ones we can possibly conceive of. Oh yeah,
I mean there's a couple of ways to go at
this if we really wanted to fall down the rabbit hole.
And one is just from a chemical chemical perspect that
we could say, well, you know, we're carbon biased. We
(23:03):
think that only life forms can can start with carbon,
But could there be another configuration that we're not aware of?
Probably not, but that's one argument. Another is that some
people will say, um, you know, there's this anthropic principle,
this idea that life here exists on Earth only because
(23:24):
it's observable to us. Therefore, life does not exist outside
of the Earth because it cannot be observed or you know,
there maybe or not life forms that can observe their
selves or themselves rather. But that one's really sticky territory
to get into as well, because again you're you're talking
(23:44):
about ideas of consciousness and what is consciousness? And then
what degree is any kind of intelligent life going to
destroy itself? To what extent is any form of intelligent
life going to eradicate other forms of life and its vicinity?
And then we sort of fall back into that whole
uh Goldilocks affair where we're again basing our understanding on
what intelligent life can be based on the only model
(24:06):
we have, and we have to depend on the only
model we have. But but then we can't help that
but have our expectations colored by that. No, but you
know what makes me feel for it's warm and cuddling
cosmic microwave background. That too, I'd like to think of
it just cooking me passively kidding. Uh. The Voyager one,
(24:26):
because it's out there, that probe that was launched in
seventy seven and seven along with Voyager two. We know
last year that it left our Solar System and it's
in interstellar space still giving us data. But you know,
it's kind of getting weak right now. It is the
the human sharpie on the bathroom of the universe, that
(24:48):
is in which we have written humans was here. I
like that. Yeah, that's because it has the gold album
on it right exactly, which contains about of different sort
of audio ephemera of life on earth. So you have
like a baby crying the sound of a kiss. You
also have images on there just in case someone intercepts
it about billion years from now. All right, well that note,
(25:12):
let's call the robot over here for just one quick
listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from
Brandon Brandon Rights, and it says, Hi, Robert and Julie.
My name is Brandon, and I'm a huge stuff to
blow your mind fan, keep up the great work. I
just listened to your brain hacking podcasts on habits. Something
you said in the podcast struck me, and so I
decided to write this email. You mentioned something about taking
a vacation as being a good way to break bad habits.
(25:34):
This is very true for me. I'm terrible with biting
my nails, and I'm constantly trying to stop. At the
end of last year, I traveled to Europe with my
sister for two weeks. When I got home, I realized
I had not bitten a single nail once. I was
completely stunned. I had not even thought about the entire
time about it. The entire time I was overseats. Simply
being in a new environment and doing new things was
enough to help break my old habit without much effort
(25:55):
on my part. To day after I got home, though,
I immediately noticed it was once again a struggle to
not by my nails, and I had to really try
hard to stop myself from doing it subconsciously. Just some
interesting tidbits I experience, and I thought I would share
love from South Africa. Brandon, all right, Yeah, I noticed
that team when I was on vacation, that I wasn't
checking my phone every two seconds, because you know, you've
(26:16):
got that compulsion. And I finally kind of broke free
of that. And the funny thing about this, my husband
is always making fun of my virgin mobile phone because
he has an shiny iPhone. But it worked brilliantly in
via case, and I think that's because Sir Richard Branson
has Neckro Island nearby, and I gotta think that the
(26:38):
network there is pretty strong. What's it called Necro Island?
Now you were getting all like Necro what Branson? There?
No no Necker. I think about his necking because it's Branson.
For some reason, I think of him as always necking.
He's always happy looking, so he looks, you know, just
tanned and like he's living the good life with a
(26:59):
robot wireless network in the islands. All right, well there
you go. UM, hey, you wanna check in with us?
You want to share your thoughts about the habitable epic?
How does that change your understanding of the cosmos? Your
thoughts on the cosmos? UH? In regards to reality or
even science fiction? What do you think extress real life
(27:20):
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(28:02):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julia
Lee Douglas. Julie, welcome back from vacation. Where did you go?
I went to Via Keys. It's a small island right
outside of Puerto Rico. I went to go see bioluminescent Bay. Yeah. Yeah,
(00:27):
with a microplankton that blows. Unfortunately, and they don't know.
I'm not quite sure what's going on there. They were
not surfacing, so they don't know if it's a changing
climate or if they were disturbed somehow. But um, kind
of a bummer. But I hope that they get that
back because it's an amazing thing. I think it's only
one of two places in the world that has that
(00:48):
level of bioluminescence. Cool. I mean you get to see
other stuff obviously, Yeah, lots of wild horses, um, all
sorts of really cool things. Well, welcome back, thank you,
Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome back listeners to
outer Space. We've been talking about wanting to hit some
more space content because I mean that's part of the
DNA of the show and we haven't been there recently,
(01:09):
So here we go into space into some big cosmic questions. Yeah,
because we've talked about this before, this idea of the
goldilocks principle and how Earth is just the perfect place, right,
it's not too hot, not too cold. Um, but what
else is going out there in the universe? And we're
going to try to get at this idea of you know,
(01:30):
the universe is not this dead, you know, void of space.
It's actually a living universe. Yeah. You you always end
up coming back around to that, that whole scenario. Right.
You look out into into space as as much as
we can as an individual understand space. You see all
that darkness and uh. And as the saying goes, there's
the idea that there's life out there, and there's the
(01:52):
idea that there's nothing out there. And both of those
ideas are completely mind blowing to think that there is
life thinking or just kerdel ng and and and you know,
reproducing itself somewhere, or there's just nothing it's just a
dead universe. And both of those have a tremendous effect
on you if you stop to really chew them over. Yeah,
especially if you add the time element to it because
(02:14):
one hand, you could look at you know, some people
look at space and the universe and they think of
it in futuristic terms. One day we will conquer it.
One day we will know more about it. Other people
look at it as a relic. As if you're peering
into deep space, you are peering into deep time, and
you can reverse engineer time and try to figure out
something about how we came into being exactly now, we
(02:36):
of course have a humans have an evolving, continuingly evolving
understanding of the cosmos. Uh. You go back not even
too long ago, in our very brief period of time
and as a species in this cosmos, and it is
just a very like the briefest little tip of the needle.
Um and uh, and you have our understanding based on
(02:58):
basically ancient Babylonia and cosmology, you know, and you have
just just very rough ideas about what we are and
where we are. You our cosmos was limited by what
we could see with the naked eye, and we, inevitably,
being self centered as we are, put ourselves at the center.
So there's the idea that the Earth was the center
of the observable universe, which again was not even that large. Yeah, um.
(03:22):
And a lot of this boils down to the Copernican principle, right,
we're talking about the mid undreds when astronomer Nicolas Copernicus said, hey,
the Earth is not the center of our solar system,
which really was disturbing too many people because that was
putting out the question of well, what if we're not
(03:43):
the center of it, and God is not the center
of it, then who is the center of it? Who's
driving this ship? And he introduced the idea of the sun.
He was a heliocentric, the idea that the Sun is
the center of things and we are just revolving around it.
Now again, based on his limited under understanding, an observation
that made perfect sense, and that was a huge step
in the right direction, because the Earth is revolving around
(04:04):
the Sun. Yeah. And we've been building on that idea
ever since and really sort of expanding out from that
and trying to figure out, Okay, so if you know
the Earth is not at the center of it, and
you know we're revolving around the Sun, and let's move
beyond that, let's move beyond our galaxy. Um. And so
we're still trying to move toward that. But you had
(04:25):
said something I thought was really interesting. You said that
are really our history and our idea of this in
terms of deep time is just occupying a space on
the tip of a pin, right, And I wanted to
mention if you guys haven't already seen this um in Cosmoses,
I know exactly where you going. Yes, uh, which is
hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He gives a wonderful explanation
(04:49):
of this idea of of really how much time we
humans are occupying in deep time, and he takes the
entire three thirteen point eight BILLI in the Age of
the Universe, and it condenses it down into one year.
This is not going to give justice to it, this explanation,
So that's why I urge everybody to to check out.
I think it's in the first episode. I think towards
(05:12):
the latter part of the first episode. Yeah, this graphic
of this calendar this one year. The first second of
January one is the Big Bang. In the last second
of December thirty one is the present day. And he
walks you through this and according to this calendar, all
life on Earth only appears within the final week of
that year, and humans appear only in the last hour
(05:32):
of the last day, and all of our recorded history,
from the founding of every religion to the fighting of
every war, takes place in the last four seconds of
December thirty one. Yeah, it's crazy, like just to think
that even if life on Earth exists only one million
more years, say in a million years, something catastrophic happens,
then life on Earth was still just this tiny little
(05:55):
blip in in this in this grand time timescape. Now
for something, well, that might make you feel sort of
divorced from um, from life, but for others, you can
look at this deep time and realize that this fabric
of um of matter that's helped to create us has
always been well, and I have not has always been there,
(06:18):
but it's been there for a really, really really long
time before and after us, and we all are intertwined
by that. So again, you mentioned that that calendar year,
that our entire cosmic history as a calendar year, that
calendar year is representing, roughly, based on our current estimates,
thirteen point eight billion years of history. That's thirteen point
(06:39):
eight billion years from the beginning of the universe as
we understanding it to the present day. Yeah, and how
do we know this, How can we calculate this? Well,
First of all, the universe cannot be younger than the
objects contained within it. So you start to look at
the objects. For instance, you look at stars and you
begin to measure their mass and their brightness and figure
out the lifespan of the start. So you have more
(07:02):
massive stars burning faster than their lower mass siblings. And
by the way, the more massive, the more brilliant they are,
and the easier they are spot So a star ten
times as massive assemble burn through its fuel supply in
twenty million years, while a star with half the Sun's
mass will last more than twenty billion years. And that
(07:24):
gives us a clue, especially when you look at something
like globular clusters, which have these similar characteristics, and you
know that the oldest one of these globular clusters have
stars with ages between eleven and eighteen billion years. All right,
So that's that's one set of evidence. It's kind of
like trying to figure out what times some guys robbed
(07:45):
a bank. You asked one one witness and I think
they went in around five pm. And you ask another
and they say, I think they went around on five pin.
And then you sort of compare the notes. Well, one uh,
one witness here is saying, I think it was it
has to be about an eleven and team billion years
based on the the age of these globular customers. Yeah,
that there's one clue that kind of gets us in
(08:05):
striking distance. Um, and we'll talk a little bit more
about why people have you know, the general consensus of
their team point eight billion years in a second. But
we have to kind of go even further back into
the path before we can do that, and we've got
to talk about this fog at the beginning of time.
And in order to do that, you got to talk
about the Big Bang. Yes, Now, big Bang, of course
(08:27):
is is the big theory about how the universe came
to be and what the basically what the universe is
really very straightforward a manner. Uh. Then the main opposition
to this was historically the steady state theory, and that's
the idea of the universe has always existed and therefore
(08:48):
it's always existed in the same density and then will
make more sense in a minute. But we're talking about
the Big Bang here, so there is no before the
Big Bang. That's important to note. There is no outside
the Big Bang, the Big Bang, to to go back
to the beginning of of of history, to go back
to the beginning of that that calendar year that we
talked about, to come to a moment when all matters
(09:08):
of singularity, and since all matters of singularity, all times
of singularity, the single point, yes, a single point of time,
a single point of of matter. It's it's it's almost
almost impossible to comprehend. It's such a foreign and even
though it's very small, it's such an immense idea that
(09:28):
time and space, everything is down to this, the smallest
point possible. And it's just kind of like my brain
almost breaks trying because I want to place my understanding
of it in a in a system of time, because
I exist in time and it's the only way I
can understand things. And this is something that that is
wrapped in time and and and it's part of its compression,
(09:48):
and it was outside of time at one point, right
And when you're talking about that pin point, you're talking
about this tiny pin point of energy. Um. This description
is from Nola Taylor Red writing for space dot Com,
and she says, when the universe was just ten thirty
four of a second, or so old that that is,
by the way, a hundreds of a billions of a
(10:09):
trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and age it
experienced a huge burst of expansion known as inflation, in
which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
And during this period the universe doubled in size at
least ninety times, going from okay, that that pinpoint, that
sub atomic size pinpoint to a golf ball size uh
(10:32):
ball of energy almost instantaneously. And she says that after inflation,
the growth of the universe continued, but it is slower rate.
And then as space expanded, the universe cooled and matter formed,
and one second after the Big Bang, the universe was
filled with neutrons, protons, electrons and anti electrons, photons and neutrinos.
(10:54):
And this is really this is where it gets very interesting.
She talked about how during the first three minutes of
the universe, light elements were born during a process noon
as Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and for three hundred eighty thousand
years or so, the universe was essentially too hot for
this light to shine. So you have that heat of
(11:14):
creation smashing atoms together with enough force to break them
up into this dense plasma soup of protons and neutrons
and electrons, and that's scattered like fog. That's the fog
of the beginning of time. That's pretty crazy. Uh, it's
no real response to that. So here we are, roughly
three seventy eight thousand years after the Big Bang. Like
(11:36):
you said, everything has been this this hot mess for ages.
That's a good way today. And uh, and there's and
there's not much that can really happen there. It's just
everything is kind of I mean, I hate to use
the word chaos, but it's kind of a chaotic state.
But then the universe cools to about five thousand degrees
fahrenheit or kelvin. And this is a crucial because this
(11:56):
is cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into
hydrogen atoms, and it also releases photons, making up the
radiation that we come to know as the cosmic microwave background. Yeah,
that recombination era sets lusa's first flashes of light that
were created during the Big Bank. So now they are
(12:18):
detectable in the form of cosmic wave background radiation. Why
is this important, Well, it's important for so many reasons.
But one is that it helps to support the big
bank theory, the fact that this is detectable right the
second witness exactly Um. The other thing is that it
allows us to again get a bigger um take on
(12:38):
what was happening in the universe. That gives us a
chance to reverse engineer the timeline. And it's been measured
with NASA's Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe and the European Space
Agencies plank spacecraft, and so they've looked at this radiation
leftover from the Big Bang and they can look at
the density, the composition, and the expansion rate of the
(13:00):
verse as a result. And in two twelve W M. A. P.
They said, Hm, we think that, you know, looking at
the different data here, that the universe is probably about
thirteen points seven seven two billion years old. Then you
have the plank Um spacecraft that says we're looking at
thirteen point eight two billion years and that's where you
(13:20):
come into this idea of all, right, the consensus is
thirteen point eight billion years old the universe is. And
again it's on one hand, we were looking at the
age of the items in the universe and here we're
looking at the rate of expansion and how big it
is and what the cosmic microwave background is telling us. Yeah,
and so okay, this is all important. Why because it
(13:44):
gives us a little bit more data to work with
and we'll talk about this in a second. Because you
start to look at the universe in a different way.
It wasn't just this you know, static thing that's always
been existing. There were dynamic changes and as a result,
it kind of up ends this idea of the Goldilocks theory,
this idea that you have to have the absolute perfect
(14:04):
conditions for life to occur. Because if you look again
at our solar system, you look at Earth, that's the
bed that Goldilocks is going to bed down in, right,
because you've got sustainable water sources that are pretty you know,
solid in terms of staying regular um, particularly when you
look at the distance the Sun is from the Earth. Right.
(14:27):
But if you look at something like Mercury, which is
closest super hot, that's not gonna work. But if you
look at Neptune super cold, or just if you're feeling nostalgic,
if you look at Pluto super cold. Um, that's what
we normally have thought about. We've thought, Okay, Earth is
really special because life has happened here against what seems
like all odds. But when we get back from this break,
(14:48):
we're going to talk about this idea that life could
be more playful than we think, and perhaps even before
Earth was even formed. All right, we're back, and you
know it's it's important to to stress again that that
(15:10):
we used to live in in a time where we
have this geocentric fallacy where we thought that the Earth
was the center of things. But when you get into
this Goldilocks scenario, you you get close to falling into
another type of geocentric fallacy because you get your again
stressing the idea that Earth is special, that the life
on Earth is special, and by virtue of that, humans
are special as the as the primary evolved intelligent speechies,
(15:33):
and therefore I am special, right, and we are all
special to a degree. But if you look into deep space,
if you look into deep time, then you start to
look at this thing called the habitable epic, and we're
talking about is for millions of years after the Big Bang,
the universe was in a kind of interim state between
(15:54):
lumpy gas and the cool galaxy. Suddenly studied darkness that
we see today when we look up at the night sky. Uh,
there were no galaxies at the time, only large stars,
probably embedded in dark matter. So along come someone named
Abraham Lobe, and he is an astrophysicist at Harvard University,
and he says, hey, we can do simulations of these
(16:14):
early years, and what people find is that there were
tens hundreds of times more massive stars than the Sun,
and these giant stars floating alone could have had rocky
worlds like Earth in orbit around them. And this is
where the idea of a habital epoch occurred, after the
Big Bang, but before life on Earth. So what does
(16:37):
Lobe do. He puts together a couple of calculations here. Yeah,
and the craziest one here is that, Okay, today, the
temperature of that relic radiation we're talking about that that
that CNB, that cosmic microwave background is just about two
point seven calvin calvin. But at an age about the
fifteen million years ago that we're talking about here, it
(16:57):
would have kept the entire universe at three hundred degrees kelvin.
So we're talking about heating emerging from that that cosmic
microwave background. Yeah, and again, this is just a blip
in the eye of time. It's fifteen million years after
the Big Bang. But any existing planets at that time
would have been in that habitable habitable zone, as you say,
(17:19):
Goldilocks hair would have had numerous beds to get into
because the universe was still bathed in that warm gas
from the cosmic microwave background, but it had cooled down,
so you would have liquid on these planets or you know,
no matter where they were in relation to a star. Yes,
which is huge because liquid water is the one of
(17:41):
the building blocks of life. Exactly. One of the things
we look for when we look out and sit and
think is this is this exoplanet capable of theoretically supporting life. Yep,
there would be energy to kick start life forms. You
have your liquid water which was slashed around the surface
of planets with atmosphere. Now, as Load points out, this
would be a very weird time for life to evolve
(18:02):
anywhere because many of the building blocks of life on Earth,
like carbon and metals, uh, they only exist because we
have these massive cellar explosions, we have the supernovast that
so you know, we're all star stuff. And there was
a lot of star stuff to go around. Because this
is early in the universe, they haven't been many stars
to die and uh and and this would have been
an age where most of the elements on the periodic
(18:23):
table didn't even exist yet, so you had fewer building
blocks to build things. But it's kind of like if
if you're really into Legos and then you find the
building blocks, be they Legos or some other brand that
like your father or an older sibling had to think,
how did they build anything? They didn't have those little
wheelie dus or the little rotating things, and I only
had the colored blocks. It seems like you would be
(18:46):
you would be very limited in what you could construct.
Uh and and Yes, that's one of the crazy things
about this is trying to imagine what would what what
would life on one of these worlds have been like that,
you know, would it what kind of form would it
have taken? Yeah, it's kind of funny because Lope says,
if you think about it right now, you look up
into the night sky and you see all these galaxies
and you see all those stars shining um and that's
(19:08):
that's sort of you know, our people out there. But
this would have been an isolated a lonely kind of
life with as you say, just a couple of lego parts, um,
would it have borne out intelligent life? Probably not um.
Alexander villen Kin as a cosmologist at Touch University in Medford, Massachusetts,
and he says that a few million years in this
(19:30):
habitable epic is too short of time to produce intelligent
life because if you think about humans and how long
it took for us and all the building blocks before
us to create, um, the sort of complex intelligence that
we have as four point five billion years of history
on Earth and uh, that's about three point five billion
(19:51):
years of those in which life has been wriggling around
our planet. But Lobe says, Hey, when I'm talking about
life taking ape here, I'm not talking about intelligent life.
I'm talking about simple life forms like allergy. Yeah. Now
another thing to keep in mind too, One another thing
that works in the advantage of this, uh, this theoretical
early life would be that that same the same isolation
(20:13):
that they that they had would also protect them from
cosmic radiation, asteroid bombardments, and other things that could conceivably
snuff out life before it even you know, got going
to any degree that mattered. That's true. Um, even though
it have been isolated and lonely. You're right, some of
those elements that might have impacted them greatly them or
whatever life, what a reform that might have taken on
(20:35):
some of those early planets wouldn't have been completely wiped
out by an asteroid. Now, some of you may be
wondering at this point, Okay, well what you know? That's
that's interesting to think that there was this this early
epic in which in which very primitive life could have
evolved and then and then perished. But how does that
affect the current scenario. It's like saying, oh, well, you know,
once long ago this happened, but but how does that
(20:57):
affect the present? Well? Ultimately, uh, what Loabs really pushing
about this idea is that it makes us have to
rethink what life could be like out there now, and
it changes the equation to a certain degree about life
in the universe as a whole, not just in in
ancient times, in an early epoch, but even in our
current epoch. That's right. That recast the idea of the
(21:18):
universe as a living universe, not a dead universe. Um,
it doesn't make Earth feel so lonely in the sense
that perhaps it's the only planet that has ever experienced
some sort of life form on it. Also, it brings
into the question this idea of if we know this,
just this fraction of information about the universe's history, what
(21:41):
else is out there to support the idea that um
somewhere and you know, buildings and billions and billions of
light years away that we can't even measure. Is there
another planet that could sustain life currently? Is it in
the near future, has it been in the past, Yeah,
(22:01):
it's And we're gonna we're gonna resist the temptation to
google go too far into the deep end on this one.
But but that you really have to then think about
all the various forms life can take without even getting
into the the idea of intelligent life, because then you
have to you have to stop and think, well, what
is what is what is it we call intelligent life?
Is it? This? Is it self consciousness? And so how
(22:22):
many different types of conscious consciousness exist for for some
sort of organic being. How many different versions of time
perception exists from an organic being? I mean, we we
spent a lot of time on this show, uh dismantling
human perception. Uh, and and you and as you just
mantle it and you you can imagine, just like a car,
if you take all the pieces apart, and if you
(22:42):
try to put them back together in varying ways, like
think of all the different ways you could reassemble some
version of intelligent life on another world. And those are
just the ones we can possibly conceive of. Oh yeah,
I mean there's a couple of ways to go at
this if we really wanted to fall down the rabbit hole.
And one is just from a chemical chemical perspect that
we could say, well, you know, we're carbon biased. We
(23:03):
think that only life forms can can start with carbon,
But could there be another configuration that we're not aware of?
Probably not, but that's one argument. Another is that some
people will say, um, you know, there's this anthropic principle,
this idea that life here exists on Earth only because
(23:24):
it's observable to us. Therefore, life does not exist outside
of the Earth because it cannot be observed or you know,
there maybe or not life forms that can observe their
selves or themselves rather. But that one's really sticky territory
to get into as well, because again you're you're talking
(23:44):
about ideas of consciousness and what is consciousness? And then
what degree is any kind of intelligent life going to
destroy itself? To what extent is any form of intelligent
life going to eradicate other forms of life and its vicinity?
And then we sort of fall back into that whole
uh Goldilocks affair where we're again basing our understanding on
what intelligent life can be based on the only model
(24:06):
we have, and we have to depend on the only
model we have. But but then we can't help that
but have our expectations colored by that. No, but you
know what makes me feel for it's warm and cuddling
cosmic microwave background. That too, I'd like to think of
it just cooking me passively kidding. Uh. The Voyager one,
(24:26):
because it's out there, that probe that was launched in
seventy seven and seven along with Voyager two. We know
last year that it left our Solar System and it's
in interstellar space still giving us data. But you know,
it's kind of getting weak right now. It is the
the human sharpie on the bathroom of the universe, that
(24:48):
is in which we have written humans was here. I
like that. Yeah, that's because it has the gold album
on it right exactly, which contains about of different sort
of audio ephemera of life on earth. So you have
like a baby crying the sound of a kiss. You
also have images on there just in case someone intercepts
it about billion years from now. All right, well that note,
(25:12):
let's call the robot over here for just one quick
listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from
Brandon Brandon Rights, and it says, Hi, Robert and Julie.
My name is Brandon, and I'm a huge stuff to
blow your mind fan, keep up the great work. I
just listened to your brain hacking podcasts on habits. Something
you said in the podcast struck me, and so I
decided to write this email. You mentioned something about taking
a vacation as being a good way to break bad habits.
(25:34):
This is very true for me. I'm terrible with biting
my nails, and I'm constantly trying to stop. At the
end of last year, I traveled to Europe with my
sister for two weeks. When I got home, I realized
I had not bitten a single nail once. I was
completely stunned. I had not even thought about the entire
time about it. The entire time I was overseats. Simply
being in a new environment and doing new things was
enough to help break my old habit without much effort
(25:55):
on my part. To day after I got home, though,
I immediately noticed it was once again a struggle to
not by my nails, and I had to really try
hard to stop myself from doing it subconsciously. Just some
interesting tidbits I experience, and I thought I would share
love from South Africa. Brandon, all right, Yeah, I noticed
that team when I was on vacation, that I wasn't
checking my phone every two seconds, because you know, you've
(26:16):
got that compulsion. And I finally kind of broke free
of that. And the funny thing about this, my husband
is always making fun of my virgin mobile phone because
he has an shiny iPhone. But it worked brilliantly in
via case, and I think that's because Sir Richard Branson
has Neckro Island nearby, and I gotta think that the
(26:38):
network there is pretty strong. What's it called Necro Island?
Now you were getting all like Necro what Branson? There?
No no Necker. I think about his necking because it's Branson.
For some reason, I think of him as always necking.
He's always happy looking, so he looks, you know, just
tanned and like he's living the good life with a
(26:59):
robot wireless network in the islands. All right, well there
you go. UM, hey, you wanna check in with us?
You want to share your thoughts about the habitable epic?
How does that change your understanding of the cosmos? Your
thoughts on the cosmos? UH? In regards to reality or
even science fiction? What do you think extress real life
(27:20):
might consist of? All these questions are valid, We'd love
to hear from you. UH. There are number ways to
get in touch with us. UH. The best is just
simply to go to stuff to Bow your Mind dot com.
That is the way to get a a strong dosage
of stuff to bow your Mind. That way, there's no
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You know, you're not having to depend on likes and shares.
That's just all of our stuff all the time. Are
(27:42):
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or Google Plus, our YouTube account which is mine stuff
show and Yes, if you want to get in touch
with the old fashioned way, tell them how they can
do it. I will in a second, but first you
(28:02):
guys gotta check out Roberts show, his Monster Show, which
is on our YouTube channel, mind Stuff Show. It's awesome,
so give it a look. See In the meantime. You
can send us an email at blow the Mind at
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.