Song 29: When the Whole Universe was a Garden of Eden …

Artist’s rendition of what a primordial quasar from the universe’s first few hundred million years might have looked like, with sheets and clouds of gas and dust, stars and early star clusters.  Little is known about the details of the astrophysics of this early time, as almost all evidence for it is hidden by these highly chaotic surroundings.  It is amid this chaos that our Song of Everything posits the first life emerged.  Image credit: Adapted from NASA/ESA/ESO/Wolfram Freudling et al. (Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility)

Here’s a Rock-solid FACT about the universe we live in:

At one time in the distant past, calculated to be around 15 million years after the Big Bang, our entire universe was bathed in room temperature radiation, such that water *EVERYWHERE IN SPACE* would be liquid.

That was the time when the flash of light that the Big Bang produced—what is now our Cosmic Microwave Background—was at Room-Temperature. It was a Wall-to-wall Goldilocks zone … where Mama and Papa and Baby Bear’s cozy kitchen was a ‘room’ 850 million light years from wall to wall!

But wait. Here come the killjoys … the cautious, conservative, consensus story that science will tell you (i.e., the ‘canon’ that best explains all the available evidence, and so is assumed to be ‘right’ until there is a better story to tell) is that this Enormous Room was nothing but an empty shell.

They’ll tell you that our little nugget of rock-solid fact about a Cosmic Goldilocks Zone doesn’t mean diddly, because 15 million years after the Big Bang we were in the ‘Cosmic Dark Ages.’ No stars had started to form yet. All that existed back then, according to the Standard Model of Cosmology, was an 850-million-light-year-sized bag of gas—consisting of free-floating molecular hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%) and a tiny trace of Lithium bathed in that room-temperature radiation. No water existed then, their story goes, and so *who cares* if it would have all been liquid.

Sorry to disappoint you, killjoys, but your story just doesn’t stand up to simple common sense, so our Song of Everything is here to tell a better story.

We’ll begin with the ‘standard disclaimer’ that our story is just a ‘Song,’ meaning that it is a proposal or a hypothesis based on a wide-ranging common-sense survey of the full, comprehensive bigger picture of what could be out there in such a vast ‘room’ in that early epoch, even if it might seem to be statistically unlikely, and how the very rare events and out-on-the-edge interactions that are neglected by the Standard Model will end up dominating things. Our resulting ‘Song’ just seems to be the picture that most naturally shakes out or falls into place or connects the known puzzle pieces (things not currently explained), including a constant series of new revelations from James Webb Space Telescope of impossibly mature looking very old galaxies.

In Song 28, we noted that life on Earth was already well established just 200 million years after the planet came into its Habitable Zone; and we concluded that ‘Life is Everywhere’ just waiting for our probes to get out there and discover it. Here in Song 29, we double down on that—reaching the conclusion that on Cosmic scales, life is not only everywhere today, but it has been widespread since nearly the beginning of the universe.

To get our story started, we go back to a much earlier time, during that period in which those primordial elements—Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium—first formed from the agitated soup of early matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

This was the time when matter was first able to form atomic nuclei, and ultimately atoms. The process is called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), and the epoch when this happened was super early relative to the 15-million-year Goldilocks era. BBN ended when the universe was just 20 minutes old, yet even then our observable universe was 300 light years in radius—already an absolutely gargantuan space for tiny, rare details to make a huge, huge difference.

What kind of tiny details are we talking about? There are two. One is pretty much rock solid. High precision BBN calculations show that it produced more than just Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium. There was also a tiny but significant concentration of the heavier elements (like Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen), which were large enough, according to the calculations, to affect the formation and evolution of the first stars. The other is the subject left hanging at the end of the level-headed video from PBS Spacetime above—the question of how gigantic quasars could have formed so early. This is the subject of a great deal of scientific interest, and the leading candidate for an answer is a subject that is still barely understood—Primordial Black Holes.

But first, back to the high-precision BBN calculations. The radiation bathing that universe during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis was at a Temperature of 10⁹ to 10⁷ degrees K. This is EXACTLY the same temperature at which hydrogen fusion begins (10⁷ K), Helium Fusion (10⁸ K) and fusion of heavier elements (10⁹ K). The (mostly iron) core of supernovae reach 10¹¹ K when they’re ready to explode. How could this NOT be related to BBN—it can’t be a coincidence. The obvious problem is that this moment in our ‘look-back,’ during which BBN happened, appears to be only a few minutes long (about 20) before the universe cooled and the fusion reactions were stopped, whereas Stellar Nucleosynthesis models show that it takes millions of years at that temperature to build up appreciable amounts of the heavy elements via fusion.

But ***Here’s where the minute details matter.*** The image below is a screen capture of a small part of a recent paper on the high-precision BBN calculations, where the authors discuss the influence of the heavier elements (which they collectively call “CNO”) on the formation of the first stars (called Population III stars):

Second, if there were Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) back then (even just a very random few), then there could also have been dynamic chaos, such as the relativistic jets emitted from rotating, heavily feeding black holes, from explosive decay of the tiniest black holes evaporating by Hawking Radiation, and from matter being whipped around the deep gravitational wells near and between black holes—all of these chaotic motions can also approach relativistic speeds.

Our Song of Everything points out that the 20-minute ‘look-back’ time is calculated from our ‘stationary’ perspective. Because of time dilation, the relativistic matter in this early chaos will reside in this Goldilocks energy regime far longer than 20 minutes by its internal clock. At the same time, other aspects of the chaos would be generating additional heat to keep the Nucleosynthesis porridge stirring at just the right temperature for much longer. These include density waves from gas cloud collisions, dynamic flows such as the spiral bands in galaxies, and all manner of angry storms and turbulence within this primordial gas … and …

… and almost certainly the formation of some very early stars far sooner than the Standard Model admits.

Even without any Primordial Black Holes, there had to be turbulent flow emerging from the decay of inflation because of the quantum fluctuations—not just the ones that are claimed to exist when inflation began, which are said to have expanded with it into the structure that formed galaxies and galaxy clusters, but those that spontaneously formed during and at the end of the epoch of inflation, making that end an uneven, ragged ‘edge’. These fluctuations would all be smaller in scale, and they are the subject of a recent discussion on Primordial Black Holes that we’re including here for those who want a full immersion at the frontier of today’s research.

This video pretty well covers the state of the art in Primordial Black Hole news. (Wikipedia offers a wider perspective and a pretty comprehensive history of the subject.) At the beginning of the video, the host, Fraser Cain, makes a humble disclaimer that sometimes he was struggling to grasp the ideas that his guest, 29-year-old Indonesian Post-Doc Physicist Jason Kristiano, was discussing. But in reality, Fraser managed to corral and summarize quite accurately the gist of the subject matter. He made only one small error that I noticed—an error that is easy to make. He assumed that Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters formed from the warm temperature anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background, when, in fact, it is the cold patches that gave birth to the galaxies because the extra gravitational pull of the denser clumps of matter put a greater drag on the light attempting to escape it, so its wavelength is stretched more.

Fraser kept a lot of the focus on the possibility that Primordial Black Holes could be a candidate for Dark Matter while the guest asserted a commonly held view that PBHs could just be a small part of it. Importantly, there is no evidence for surviving primordial black holes at all, so they’re either very rare or were all very small and have already all evaporated.

No matter. Our Song of Everything’s interest in this discussion is not on today’s quest to explain Dark Matter, but on the very early period before any but the tiniest of black holes would have evaporated, and on the effect that the high-amplitude quantum fluctuations that Jason was talking about would have on the surrounding matter.

Even if these fluctuations that appeared during the period of inflation (or most of them) did not reach amplitudes to produce significant numbers of PBHs, they would still have a significant impact on the post-inflation environment.

As a reminder, the Standard Model of Cosmology is fully dependent on the blanket assumption that Inflation smoothed the Universe at all scales so that it can be assumed to be homogeneous and isotropic. Yet this model *still* allows the first stars to form within 50 to 200 million years after the Big Bang. Our Song of Everything is just demonstrating that all the important anomalies in the tail of the statistical distribution will start stars earlier, never later. We therefore argue that it should be possible and relatively simple to build a bridge on solid piers of additional local star forming zones that might be statistically uncommon but would nevertheless become highly likely across the vast expanses of the cosmos during those ‘Dark Ages’ between the Goldilocks zone at 15 million years, and the Standard Model’s onset of Star Formation.

The picture seems pretty natural and comfortable and common sense, doesn’t it?

Turbulence, shock waves, random flow, and general chaos on star-forming scales seems just about unavoidable and readily stirs the porridge pot; and all this smaller-scale stuff is not adequately represented in the story told by the Standard Model.

Here’s another image, not an artist’s rendition, but a NASA Image from Hubble Space Telescope of a young star forming in a stellar nursery of gas and dust in the Orion Nebula—an object called Herbig-Haro Object 24.

It is exactly those sorts of chaotic environments of molecular (not ionized) gas and clouds of dust and miscellaneous heavy elements that are the stellar nurseries in today’s galaxies and were just about ubiquitous in the early universe!

The flow of all of the discussion above points to a far earlier start to the formation of the first stars. There seems a real possibility, and even a likelihood, that in isolated pockets, stars could, indeed, have begun forming during the Goldilocks CMB period 15 million years after the Big Bang.

Population III stars—these first stars—burn through their nearly pure hydrogen-helium fuel much faster than later stars. Many of them would have gone super-nova in just 2 to 5 million years, releasing great chaotic clouds of the precious heavy elements necessary for life to form.

In the chaos, free oxygen molecules from the stellar explosions (and the few that were formed during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis way back as early as 20 minutes after the Big Bang) would get together with the ubiquitous hydrogen, and water would quickly form. Our argument is that in the statistical tail of the density spectrum of matter during these early times, there could feasibly have already been concentrations of water and the other constituents needed to for life as soon as 15 million years after the big bang.

These ‘small pockets’ with life-forming heavy elements would by no means be small in comparison to individual stars. The evidence for very metal-rich, very young galaxies that is being gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope points to the fact that such ‘small pockets’ could easily be the size of whole galaxies driven by actively feeding super-massive quasars and would contain all the chaos of galaxy-scale Starburst gas clouds. This is exactly the scene depicted in the opening image.

NOW – in Song 28, we thoroughly explored the topic of how quickly life appeared after planet Earth entered its ‘Goldilocks zone’. Here, we extend that argument to these early epochs where far, far more of the universe’s matter existed in Goldilocks zones that could have been as large as whole starburst dust and gas clouds, and perhaps whole galaxies.

We argue that the simple single-celled extremophile life-forms that are known to have gotten a quick start here on earth, would have done the same in countless rocky rogue planets and stellar primordial protoplanetary discs way back then, when the habitable zone was everywhere. Life’s greatest dominance would have been in these early chaotic environments that stretched far and wide across that Enormous Room 850 million light years from wall to wall.

The more rocks that get banged together, bringing with them the raw materials for developing and sustaining life (‘food’ and energy), the better it is for these rugged, hardy microbes.

Life would soon be everywhere. In a timeframe that is remarkably similar to the time it took for life to establish here on Earth (the first 200 million years), it seems highly plausible that life would have proliferated across ALL of our Universe.

All in the first 200 million years after the Big Bang.

And then ... maybe it has been all downhill since. This is a remarkable and surprising perspective. It is arguable that we humans live in the universe’s twilight years—in an era of slow, steady decline in life’s abundance. The era of dominance of the Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire of the Single-cell Microbes (who we have called the “Twees”) may have come and gone long-long ago.

As our universe cools, the Goldilocks zones are shrinking and concentrating and becoming increasingly isolated from one another. Life finds itself huddling closer and closer to individual stars or retreating deep into the still-hot cores of planets.

From the point of view of those robust extremophile microbes, our universe today would seem positively deserted, inhospitable, and hopelessly geriatric!

Yet here we are, clinging on, thanks to the ever-adaptable single-celled beings, who have learned to cooperate to form cognizant, symbolic-reasoning, technological operatives to do their bidding.  Yes, we are those operatives—nothing but advanced colonies of 30-trillion specialized single cells!  Yet, what a marvelous construction we are!  Our quick-thinking brains blink on and we look around. Wow! Here we sit in one of the universe’s dwindling goldilocks zones, entirely comfortable, relaxing on our couches!

So … what role is left for us in this positively ancient, dying universe?

The possibilities are nearly unlimited! We named a few of them way back at the end of Song 21 (see the very end of that long post).

To be sure, we have to take care of our own house first. The universe may already be ancient from the perspective of the Twees, but the future remains vast, and our role in it obviously requires us to not kill ourselves off.

Our immediate role, then—the thing we can do right now and are already doing—is to be the documenter of the workings of this astounding universe. With our symbolic-reasoning minds and the disciplines that the natural sciences have steered us toward, we have established a beachhead of useful descriptive understanding of how a lot of things work.

Our purposes in this regard are three: to continue to discover more, to establish as permanent a record as we can of what we have learned, and to disseminate this record to the “Universe at Large”—by which we mean a place and a time and a way of being that we may not even be able to recognize or comprehend (yet), but which is out there in the realm of nearly unlimited possibility for the future.

Our Comfortable Universe’s Song of Everything now launches into that realm. Again, back in Song 21, we broached the subject with the introduction of Flat World. In other contexts, we have contemplated the Twees and how we humans may partner with them. We’ve talked extensively about Universes having Babies. We have contemplated how Humans might become active participants in Universe Self-Replication, potentially finding ways to transcend our present universe, either physically, or by transmitting the knowledge we’ve gathered, or even a hybrid of the two!

It’s mostly fun at this point, but we always attempt to remain rooted in and constrained by what is physically possible.

And that is why we will always come back to our advocacy for a comprehensive cosmic search and discovery mission. If some other species somewhere in a past universe or in a far-away galaxy, has preceded us in assuming the role of documenters of the nature of our shared existence, then maybe their messages are out there to be found. Perhaps they’re embedded deep in those interstellar rocks that come to visit. Maybe they’re coded in some structure that our universe has inherited, perhaps even in something as abstract as a Quantum Wave Function. (Is it possible to ‘invent’ a new quantum field and manufacture it in a lab? Have we already done something like that with meta-materials?!)

We will never be done exploring; and you are all invited to come along for the ride.

Song 28: The Hidden Intergalactic Empire

 It’s all around us.  Here’s how to make contact.

Low-tech Intergalactic space-ships from small rocks to comets to whole intact solar systems are being flung out into intergalactic space all the time.  There are a trillion estimated “rogue stars” (free-flying stars that have escaped their home galaxy) in the Virgo Cluster alone!  What passengers might these space-faring missiles be carrying with them?  Image, courtesy of NASA, is a Hubble Space Telescope view of ‘The Mice’ galaxies, 300 million light years away—merging galaxies NGC 4676.

And now, after 27 songs, we come to the subject of Life in the Cosmos.

The staff at Comfortable Universe Headquarters is prepared to make a bold, uncompromising claim and we have a common-sense argument to back it up:

Life is EVERYWHERE!

Exhibit A: Earth 4.2 billion years ago (bya).  Recent genetic analysis indicates that the LUCA life form—the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” of all surviving life—lived at that time. That is just a few hundred million years after Earth came into existence.

Could something flick life’s light switch on that fast if it was a rare and uncommon event?

Importantly, LUCA was a surprisingly complex organism. It already had to have a long history of evolution, which suggests that it lived in a diverse microbial community including predatory viruses. LUCA had a cell membrane enclosing its cytoplasm, which included DNA, RNA, and Ribosomes (the tools required to build proteins). Its DNA encoded around 2600 different proteins and included a simple immune system called CRISPR that protects it from invading viruses.

Clearly, LUCA was far from the original simple entity that first crossed the threshold from inorganic blob to living thing.

And it is the crossing of that mysterious threshold that we most want to focus on here in Song 28. Based on the LUCA genetic analysis and on geologic studies of Earth’s early history and on fossil evidence, it had to happen super-fast (by Cosmic and geologic standards). Earth consolidated from the protoplanetary disk about 4.54bya; and there is already evidence for liquid water on Earth by 4.4bya. 200 million years later, you had LUCA.

There are two ways to view the story of the first crude life forms—the amorphous blobs that first crossed the threshold from inorganic ‘posers’ to self-sustaining, self-replicating guardians of their own identities.  The first view is that it only happened once.  The argument there (which is statistically nearly impossible to defend) is that if it happened more than once, science would have found completely unrelated versions of living things, i.e., with no genetic common features.  Even arguing how that could work is a problem if both of these entities use the same inorganic building blocks as their raw material.  The two life forms would have to have completely different internal structures and chemistry.  Even today’s organisms, known to have lots of genes in common (humans share 60% of the same DNA with bananas) have drastically different metabolic pathways and interact with their environments in completely different ways.

No, it seems far more likely that what happened is that life formed multiple times in the gigantic worldwide long-running lab experiment that began 4.4bya (more on this in a moment), but then one (our LUCA) found a competitive advantage, began to dominate its ecosystem and effectively overwhelmed all of the other members of its community.  There is an analogy here to human beings.  Once, not long ago, Homo sapiens shared the landscape with several other Homo species, but we outcompeted them and/or assimilated them to the point that all others have lost their species identities and/or gone extinct.

So ... from habitability (liquid water on a chemically diverse, well-mixed rocky crust) to the first spark of life in somewhere between zero and *well before* 200 million years? This is the key basis of our Song of Everything’s common-sense argument that life is everywhere.

After that … after life gets started … perhaps a lot of the habitable planets in the universe run into problems. But once that spark is ignited, we don’t care! Read on for the continuation of the argument.

LUCA’s home—Earth 4.2bya—would seem like a living hell to us. It was under constant heavy bombardment by a rain of large and small meteors, asteroids, and rock fragments that were still roaming the proto-planetary disc. LUCA probably lived in deep, extremely active hydrothermal vents, which were the byproducts of these continuous impacts.

According to latest research, summarized in the 21 January 2026 PBS NOVA episode entitled “Asteroids: Spark of Life,” life may have had its start and actually its ‘heyday’ during that heavy early meteor bombardment in the Hadean Epoch of Earth, when a deep layer of the crust was constantly being seeded with the chemical raw materials for life and churned and stirred by the impacts, creating millions or billions of highly active hydrothermal vents worldwide.

Here’s a Chemistry thought experiment: How many chemical components did the first spark of life require to be gathered and arranged ‘just so’? 100? 1000? How many years of actively mixing these components in a hot soup of nearly boiling water in one single hydrothermal vent are needed to get all these components properly arranged? Can you imagine such a chemical experiment running in a lab for 1000 years? A million years? The famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment got significant results, and it was run for ONLY ONE WEEK!

Come on! The entire Earth was seething with hydrothermal vents, constantly being blasted by more impacts. We didn’t have just one lone isolated experiment—we had millions or billions of them! And they weren’t running for just seven days but continuously for hundreds and thousands of years! All to just get a handful of chemical components to combine in a fairly straightforward configuration. This is NOT brain surgery! Come on, people! Common sense.

Isn’t it just the most natural, most likely conclusion that the first crude life forms were already living and thriving well before 100 frikkin’ million years? It only took 50 million years to raise the Himalayas from sea level.  As these early organisms crossed various simple thresholds of self-preservation and self-replication, they would have taken more and more charge of their own development.

Would you bet against it happening somewhere amid millions to billions of different experiments being run in a planet-wide laboratory with 197 million square miles of floor space, with the various experiments being run non-stop for even just ONE MILLION YEARS? Hell, no! I sure wouldn’t.

How about 100,000 years? (With the first Lab techs not even able to write—their notebooks being crude images drawn on cave walls?) Still probably a safe bet.

Life in its simplest single-cell form is just not that special. You could think of it as just a little more complicated version of fire.

But … “Intelligent” life? Human beings? That’s a whole different story.

Earth 4.2bya was not a place that could have evolved intelligent life as we understand it; and, as we said earlier, this Song 28 just doesn’t care about that.

Forget about the vaunted Drake Equation and the speculations regarding the Fermi Paradox. (Where are all our cognitive, symbolic-reasoning, technological neighbors? Are we really the only ones?)

Our Comfortable Universe’s adamant claim is that if there is or was a Great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire, it is and/or was run by the simplest of single-cell microbes.

It just makes sense.

On Earth, the appearance of the kind of intelligent life that we’re familiar and comfortable with took more than Four Billion Years, and many, many accidents of evolution. THAT seems to be a huge long-shot by comparison to the simple single-celled organisms who have ruled our planet almost since the beginning.

Those—the simple humble microbes—are far more competent space travelers—far more versatile, adaptable, and hardy than our fragile human bodies.

Now ... about that interstellar travel.  We go back to Earth 4.2bya: Some of those constant meteor impacts were spewing rocks back out into space.  And riding on/in these rocks were our early extremophile organisms. These natural spaceships would have now been travelling the cosmos for 4 billion years.

Buried deep in a cocoon of solid rock, where our organisms are protected from all radiation, these space-farers, who could be traveling upwards of a few hundred kilometers per second (which is 1/1000^th the speed of light and is a conservative estimate for the upper limit for how fast such objects could be flung into space from a collision) will have traveled at least 4 million light years already.  That means they could have easily reached the Galaxy Andromeda and its 1 trillion stars by now, not to mention potentially seeding life on every single habitable planet in our entire Milky Way.

Conversely, every one of those billion or more habitable planets across the Milky Way probably had their own Hadean Epoch bombardment and their own chemical experiments going on early in their histories; and, we argue, assuming our Earth is nothing too extraordinary, many or most of those planets may also have spawned life, given how quickly it happened here. The resulting ejected objects would be ubiquitous and should be passing through our solar system regularly.

To date, we know of just three interstellar visitors: 1I/Oumuamua (2017), 2I/Borisov (2019) and the recent 3I/ATLAS that is just now exiting our solar system. But we can only see the big ones. There have probably been MANY smaller ones that have escaped detection.

There are several other ways that Cosmic space probes with our simple microbes could have been launched. On the other end of the size scale from planet-bombarding meteors and rocks, astronomers have discovered a handful of ‘hypervelocity stars’ that have been ejected from the Milky Way, probably by encounters with the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s center. To date, the fastest of these, S5-HVS1, is traveling at 1,755 km/s (3,930,000 mph), almost 0.6% of the speed of light!

If whole stars, probably accompanied by planetary systems, are known to be traveling at speeds easily capable of reaching other galaxies, then how many smaller objects are out there doing the same thing?

The Crab Nebula, courtesy of NASA/ESA.  Remnants of supernova that exploded in 1054AD, sending material traveling outward at 1500 km per second.

There are even more violent events going on, which could yield even faster speeds—from supernovas (such as the Crab Nebula shown above) to galaxy collisions (see the opening image).

In terms of intergalactic space travel, our Universe seems to have it covered, folks.

* * *

Now here’s the practical homework assignment for us supposedly intelligent life forms: If we are at all serious about establishing an interstellar space program, BY FAR the cheapest, most efficient and most technologically feasible way available for us to get started TODAY is to organize a systematic “search and intercept” system for any interstellar objects that visit our own solar system.

Imagine if Charles Darwin could have collected his samples of species from around the world by simply deploying a big net outside his office rather than embarking on the expensive and time-consuming multi-year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.

The long-established practice of collecting light arriving at Earth from the far reaches of the cosmos has already proven its worth many times over. We argue that collecting material samples, and especially drill cores that sample the undisturbed interior, from passing interstellar visitors will also prove to have a huge cost-benefit advantage over those dreamed-of deep space expeditions.

What can we expect to find in samples from the visiting interstellar ‘spaceships’?

We won’t know until we look, of course. Regardless of the discovery of any signatures of life, samples from a variety of interstellar objects will be invaluable in improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of … Everything … from stars and their planetary systems through our galaxy’s structure, and even the universe itself.

Here’s a sampler of some of the surprises we could find: The average interstellar object is likely to be old for two reasons. The first is just because the rock had to travel a long way from some other system to get here. But the second could be far more interesting. The universe has been creating rocks for a long time, and those oldest rocks could tell stories of this ancient history that we cannot see with our telescopes.

Even the astounding new discoveries of distant galaxies that the James Webb Space Telescope is making have their limits. There have been tantalizing hints of galaxies that seem far more mature than our Standard Cosmological Model can explain. But the farther back in time you try to look, the fainter and noisier and more distorted the signal is likely to be.

But if the Standard Model is right in assuming that the structure and evolution of the universe is and was the same everywhere, then the same stuff was happening right here in our backyard, and those early events had to leave behind their calling cards—debris from all the chaotic formation and destruction of generations of big and little objects.

Theory says that the first stars did not and could not produce any rocks directly. The best current theories suggest that these first stars were short lived.  Many of them exploded within just a few million years, leaving behind the first heavy elements that could then begin to consolidate into the first rocks. But how fast those first rocks might have formed is entirely unknown. That’s one huge reason why a program to seek out and study the interstellar and intergalactic rocks in our neighborhood could be so important.

What science knows about that first generation of stars (stupidly called Population III stars for historical reasons) is sketchy at best, because they have never been observed—not even one of them. They’re long gone, and so the ones we could see in the distant past are just too far away.

Therefore, the speculation about how these stars behaved is entirely based on theory … and the theory that science is using is not equipped to adequately deal with such small things as individual stars. The Standard Model of Cosmology starts from a sweeping assumption of a homogeneous and isotropic universe—smooth and uniform everywhere you look at all scales. It is therefore silent on the subject of the nature of the little local density fluctuations needed to start individual stars forming.

The Standard Model doesn’t even have a good grip on the much bigger density fluctuations that we have evidence for—the observed 1-in-100,000 fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, which we discussed at length in Song 25. Those “210-foot-high hills in a 70-mile-wide landscape” produced our observed galaxies and galaxy clusters; but the way they formed and evolved (in the Standard Model) depends on the unknown structure and unknown behavior of the unknown stuff called Dark Matter (*Cold* Dark Matter is specifically assumed in the Standard Model); so, it’s all just more speculation and guesswork.

Getting our hands on one of those extremely old first rocks and studying them would be like travelling 13 billion light years across the universe and back. Talk about precious!

C’mon, NASA! Get those astronauts on your South-Pole Moon Base to work capturing interstellar objects, please! Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense sending missions to land on a future Oumuamua and collecting samples? It seems at least as productive as sending people all the way to Mars.

Meanwhile, explain why it’s smarter to send human beings to Mars *instead* of bringing back the rock samples already collected by Perseverance. And please send a fleet of robotic missions to search for life on Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc.

The world is waiting! We are eager to meet our Intergalactic Companions!