I was watching a speaker talk about religious beliefs and while he was explaining why dinosaurs didn't live 3 or 4 thousand years ago, he illustrated the time scale of earth, from formation to humans using the length of his arm. That's when it hit me. It took almost two thirds of the time, from the formation of earth until the more complex life forms (dinosaurs) appeared. With humans appearing at the last end of the last third. Isn't that about what happened with the Universe formation? It took almost 2/3 of the time from the big bang until now, for the complex materials (heavier elements) to form in sufficient quantity to produce life capable planets.
If that's some sort of probability curve, perhaps the formation of life capable planets and the emergence of intelligent life, might be more closely grouped on the timeline of the universe, than previously thought. I'm thinking Carl Sagan wise, where he speculates about how large or small the time differences might be, between human emergence and that of any alien culture. Where there might be some sort of distribution of habitable planet formation around stars, that is very closely connected to the two thirds of the time the universe has been in existence.
Obviously this is a problem of probability, where, if some theory, based on theoretical "observations" were to determine, for example, that because of the quantity of heavy elements present at given points in time, life sustaining planets could not form earlier than THIS = Xn. Then from
Xn forward the probable rate of planet formation might be deduced by other statistical observations, to arrive at a period of time, over which habitable planets could begin forming. From there we would
then theorize that nearly two thirds of the time from formation to now, would be needed for intelligent life to arrive.
Of course, this exercise if mounted, would still leave some pretty large gaps over which intelligent life might have formed on exto planets, perhaps on the order of millions to even hundreds of millions of years, but nothing like the time periods over which we had to guess about before, which would have been as large as billions of years. By reducing the possible separation of the times during which life could have appeared anywhere in the universe, we might just happen on an idea that might tell where best to look.
It's not so far fetched as one might think at first glance, after all, we did discover the "big bang" and were were not only able to locate a time for it, but times for the emergence of it's various features as well. We discovered that the speed of light was not the limit it is today, but that, it only imposed itself on the universe after it had cooled and/or expanded to certain proportions.
If that's some sort of probability curve, perhaps the formation of life capable planets and the emergence of intelligent life, might be more closely grouped on the timeline of the universe, than previously thought. I'm thinking Carl Sagan wise, where he speculates about how large or small the time differences might be, between human emergence and that of any alien culture. Where there might be some sort of distribution of habitable planet formation around stars, that is very closely connected to the two thirds of the time the universe has been in existence.
Obviously this is a problem of probability, where, if some theory, based on theoretical "observations" were to determine, for example, that because of the quantity of heavy elements present at given points in time, life sustaining planets could not form earlier than THIS = Xn. Then from
Xn forward the probable rate of planet formation might be deduced by other statistical observations, to arrive at a period of time, over which habitable planets could begin forming. From there we would
then theorize that nearly two thirds of the time from formation to now, would be needed for intelligent life to arrive.
Of course, this exercise if mounted, would still leave some pretty large gaps over which intelligent life might have formed on exto planets, perhaps on the order of millions to even hundreds of millions of years, but nothing like the time periods over which we had to guess about before, which would have been as large as billions of years. By reducing the possible separation of the times during which life could have appeared anywhere in the universe, we might just happen on an idea that might tell where best to look.
It's not so far fetched as one might think at first glance, after all, we did discover the "big bang" and were were not only able to locate a time for it, but times for the emergence of it's various features as well. We discovered that the speed of light was not the limit it is today, but that, it only imposed itself on the universe after it had cooled and/or expanded to certain proportions.
No comments:
Post a Comment