Why are we now? Researchers suggest life on Earth may be early in cosmic terms August 23, 2016 Why are we now? We know that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old, and that someday it is likely to end—perhaps because of a Big Freeze, Big Rip or Big Crunch. But what can we learn by considering our own place in the history of the universe? Why does life on Earth exist now, rather than at some point in the distant past or future? A team of researchers including astrophysicists from the University of Oxford has set about trying to answer these questions—and their results raise the possibility that we Earthlings might be the first to arrive at the cosmic party. The paper, led by Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University and published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, suggests that life in the universe is much more likely in the future than it is now. That's partly because the necessary elements for life, such as carbon and oxygen, took tens of millions of years to develop following the Big Bang, and partly because the lower-mass stars best suited to hosting life can glow for trillions of years, giving ample time for life to evolve in the future. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-life-earth-early-cosmic-terms.html#jCp
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2016/08/040/meta Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Relative likelihood for life as a function of cosmic time Abstract Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of the Universe, dP(t)/dt, starting from the first stars and continuing to the distant cosmic future. We conservatively restrict our attention to the context of ``life as we know it'' and the standard cosmological model,ΛCDM . We find that unless habitability around low mass stars is suppressed, life is most likely to exist near ~ 0.1M⊙ stars ten trillion years from now. Spectroscopic searches for biosignatures in the atmospheres of transiting Earth-mass planets around low mass stars will determine whether present-day life is indeed premature or typical from a cosmic perspective.
I can understand big freeze , but what is big crunch or big rip ? Are those scientific terms ? Professor forgot to mention Phosphorus By the way where and where is the cosmic party ?
Big Crunch: Universe collapsing back in on itself: [closed geometry so unlikely] Big Rip: Virtually expanding until spacetime actually rips itself apart.
