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From:	Jaq (12.236.178.78)
Subject:	Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old?
Date:	June 19, 2009 at 8:48 am PST

Thought I would share what some of us find interesting.

Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old?
By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
17 June 2009
Much of the search for life outside of Earth's biological oasis has focused on examining the conditions on the other planets in our solar system and probing the cosmos for other Earth-like planets in distant planetary systems.

But one team of astronomers is approaching the question of life elsewhere in the universe by looking for life's potential beginning.

Aparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements – those essential to life as we know it – might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form.

We can pin down the emergence of life on Earth to somewhere around 3.5 billion years ago. Venkatesan and Rothschild want to find out what happens when you broaden the question to life throughout the universe.

"Can you blast that open? Could you really start really talking about life in the universe at 12 billion years? And that's the question that we're talking about," Rothschild said.

More links at this site.....

• http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090617-aas-bio-elements.html