It’s a little mind-boggling to think about, but there was a time when no stars existed in the universe. The earliest stars, galaxies and black holes came into being in a wondrous period called “cosmic dawn,” some 250 to 350 million years after the Big Bang.

All sorts of ingredients of our universe were popping into existence at that time: stars, galaxies, black holes. Given all the components were there, could that short list include life itself? Could aliens have popped up much earlier in the universe’s 13.8 billion year history?

The question of how life first came into existence has exercised scientists and philosophers for millenia. In a 2016 book on the subject, Sean Carroll describes how Jan Baptist van Helmont, a 17th Century chemist, thought that “the way to create mice from nonliving materials is to place a soiled shirt inside an open vessel, along with some grains of wheat.” After about twenty-one days, the wheat would supposedly have turned into mice.

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“If for some reason you wanted to make scorpions rather than mice, he recommended scratching a hole in a brick, filling the hole with basil, covering with another brick, and leaving them out in sunlight.”

As Carroll goes on to say, “if only it were that easy.” One interesting angle on the question might be to go back not to the early years of Earth, but further — to those earliest millions of years after the Big Bang, when gravity essentially turned on the lights, pulling “us” out of the dark ages of a hot, dense and boring early universe into a cooler, more complex reality.

"One hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were pockets of enriched material that could have led to planets and life as we know it, potentially,"

Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics co-operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, and a theoretical physicist focused on cosmology and astronomy, told Salon that with some creative thinking, it might be possible to find evidence that life started far, far earlier than the earliest evidence we have for it on Earth.

“I would say one hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were pockets of enriched material that could have led to planets and life as we know it, potentially,” Loeb said.

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After all, that’s when the essential elements that make up life first appeared in our universe. Rooting around just in our solar system, we’re already finding evidence of the building blocks of life in unexpected places. In December, scientists studying findings from the Cassini mission (which sent a space probe to Saturn and its system in 1997, wrapping up in 2017) uncovered evidence of hydrogen cyanide on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. So if we’ve already found water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen gas on Saturn’s icy moon — which scientists predict are some of the crucial elements necessary for life to........

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