Which is just a little bit better science than looking at that same one square foot of sand and declaring that there must be elephants in Africa.
The first stars formed very quickly and often with vast supplies of matter to form a great many super-giant and hyper-giant Population I stars. These overly massive stars have correspondingly far shorter life spans and tend to supernova or hypernova in as little as a half-million years to a few million years.
Thanks. Like I said, I didn't know how long those would take so I didn't know if the original population I stars would have had their first supernovas yet.
. The chances of this common chemical reaction being absent within the trillions upon trillions of planets and planetoid environments appears to be virtually impossible.
There is a huge gap between absent everywhere and present everywhere. The author stated that life would be present everywhere with no evidence.
I had a professor who told his class that you can have one unproven speculation in a paper. If you put in more you might as well be writing a sci fi story. This story had a bunch of those speculations asserted as facts. I'll leave that for Art Bell.
You’re treating it as if they were declaring an African elephant, whereas the paper is really speculating upon the likeliehood that the conditions they are observing could in their opinion of their observations support the possibility of African elephants, perhaps from the Ringling Bros circus on your very doorstep. Science fiction? Yes, but let’s not denigrate science fiction or demean it as no more than science fantasy. Science fiction has served us well. I recall attending a lecture at which the professor promised was to concern interstellar space travel. After going to great effort and cost to travel to this lecture, the professor spent the first ten minutes forcefully ridiculing any possibility of interstellar space travel and changed the subject to inorganic chemistry. Feeling cheated at the inconvenience of the ten minute denouncment of the subject of the two hour lecture, the temptation to shout from the back seats to refute the professor was overly tempting. Interstellar space travel is very possible even with relatively primitive technologies close to what exists at present. It only requies inter-generational space habitats using asteroidal habitats and a lot of time. Other forms of life could conceivably be much more at home in space and propogate across an entire galaxy within millions of years, which is a short time span within tens of billions of years.