Ask Ethan: Did life begin when the Universe was room temperature?

Ask Ethan: Did life begin when the Universe was room temperature?

Our Universe, as we observe it today, is vast and isolated, with enormous amounts of space between the stars, and with stars clustered into trillions of galaxies scattered across tens of billions of light-years. It’s also extraordinarily cold; aside from the starlight that heats up matter locally, there’s only a very low-energy background of radiation coming from the cosmos itself: a thermal bath of blackbody radiation at 2.725 K, or less than t…