Could life have emerged when the universe was at room temperature?

This article was inspired by the popular article ” Ask Ethan: Did life begin when the Universe was room temperature? of Ethan Siegel (see this).

One can consider this question in both standard cosmology and in the TGD inspired cosmology. For both options, if one identifies life as chemical life, the building brick atoms of various important biomolecules should have been present at this stage of cosmological evolution.

Cosmic microwave background (CMB) was decoupled from matter at temperature 3,000 K, below which only light neutral atoms, but no molecules, were present. After that CMB temperatures decreased and at some moment it was equal to T∼ 300 K. The identification of the temperature T for the emergence of life as temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is excluded since no basic bio-molecules were present at that time, only simplest atoms were present. Therefore the temperature T∼ 300 K for matter should have emerged during the gravitational heating.

If the heating led to the ordinary nuclear fusion, it is difficult to understand how the biomolecules could have survived. In the standard cosmology this does not look plausible. Therefore the answer to the question is negative.

In TGD inspired cosmology, the temperature T would naturally correspond to the quantum critical temperature T_P ∼ 300 K for the Pollack effect (see this). In TGD it would be involved with the transformation of protons to their dark counterparts at magnetic flux tubes (see this, this, this, this and this). Dark nuclei would have transformed to ordinary nuclei liberating almost all nuclear binding energy. The temperature T_P would have been reached by gravitational heating and Pollack effect would make possible the generation of nuclei by dark fusion (see this, this, this and this) in turn forming the needed biomolecules.

One can argue that the liberated energy heats the matter to even higher temperatures and the ordinary fusion is ignited. However, the infinite number of degrees of freedom for the monopole flux tubes implies that there is a limiting temperature T_H (see this and this), analogous to the Hagedorn temperature (see this) discovered in string models and nuclei could be generated solely by “cold fusion” without not ignition of ordinary fusion. Note that there is an entire hierarchy of Hagedorn temperatures corresponding to preferred p-adic length scales characterizing the flux tubes.

The biomolecules would have survived if T_P was slightly below the Hagedorn temperature T_H for the monopole flux tubes serving as an upper bound for the temperature of flux tubes and therefore of the temperature of matter. Dark fusion could have generated planets (see this) and perhaps even part of the matter of the Sun (see this), the physics of which could be dramatically different from that in the standard model. If so, the ordinary nuclear fusion could be replaced with dark fusion in TGD. Life could have emerged much earlier than in the standard cosmology.

See the article Could life have emerged when the universe was at room temperature?.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.