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my favourite hypothesis for the first life is the idea that the entire universe might have been habitable for a while: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613

of course, it's very unlikely, but it's such a cool idea!



It is indeed a cool idea, but it is likely completely wrong.

For life, it is not enough for the ambient temperature at the surface of a planet to be acceptable.

For life to appear, it is necessary that the interior of the planet is much hotter than the surface, so that this thermal non-equilibrium will be converted into chemical non-equilibrium by volcanism.

When the universe had cooled to a habitable temperature after the Big Bang, if any celestial bodies existed they were in thermal equilibrium, so they could not provide any energy for the appearance of life.

The internal heat of a planet normally has 2 sources, the radioactive decay of heavy elements that have been produced only in catastrophic events that have happened late in the history of Universe, e.g. supernova explosions or neutron star impacts, and the residual heat produced from collisions with other planets.

For satellites close to big planets or for planets close to stars there may be also heat produced by tidal deformations.

Such sources of heat are unlikely to have existed in the early Universe, and even supposing that collisions could have existed, in that case the environment with a life-enabling temperature would not have been correlated with the epoch when the entire Universe had a temperature that now is suitable for life.

Moreover life cannot appear without chemical elements up to the iron-cobalt-nickel group, which are the chemical catalysts on which life depends as much as on the structural elements HCNOS.

The iron group elements are generated only late in the lifetime of a star, so life can appear only in celestial bodies that recycle matter from explosions of the first generation stars, billions of years after the Big Bang and long after the Universe had cooled.


The discussion on the origin of life often focuses on where and how it began, but I believe it is just as important to consider the fundamental role of life in the universe. What purpose does life serve in a cosmic context? What physical effects does it have on planetary systems? Rather than analyzing the current state of life, we may gain deeper insights by working backward from the necessary conditions for life’s existence.

One possible hypothesis is that life functions as a thermal regulation system. Just as in the story of Goldilocks, where conditions must be "just right" for life to emerge, the presence of life itself may play a role in maintaining this balance. If life only arises under optimal thermal conditions, then its role might include sustaining those conditions over time.

At the same time, life has evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from plants to animals, continuously increasing in complexity and mobility. This suggests that life is not meant to remain confined to one place but is naturally inclined to spread, even beyond planetary boundaries. If this hypothesis holds, life inherently seeks movement and expansion —consciously or unconsciously— and has the potential to terraform multiple habitable planets.

From an entropy perspective, life plays a dual role: it disperses across space while simultaneously reducing local entropy through intelligence-driven processes. This cycle of diffusion, local convergence, and further expansion could be a fundamental aspect of life’s function. In simpler terms, life may be an entropy regulation mechanism, which makes the possibility of life existing and thriving beyond Earth highly plausible.

Much like how ancient Earth’s organisms were unaware of each other’s existence across vast distances, it is entirely possible that extraterrestrial life operates within a similarly fractal pattern, remaining beyond our current recognition.




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