Re: New York Times re Fermi's Question

>"Matt Giwer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Joseph Lazio wrote:
>
> > The next question is, When did the amount of heavy elements build up
> > to a sufficient amount that planets and intelligent beings could form?
> > We don't yet know the answer to this question, though Mario Livio has
> > speculated that this might have taken a large fraction of the
> > Universe's age.
>
> When we know all possible forms of life we will know the elements needed
for them. But as
> we know the distribution of elements is not uniform we will still be
dealing with the
> statistics of guessing what is a significant concentration of them in the
same place for
> life to start. There is no law against life being limited to a small area
of one planet
> where the essential elements are all in one place.

Or to one region of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies ...

>
> --
> Hodie decimo quinto Kalendas Decembres MMIII est
>       -- The Ferric Webceasar
>