For nine billion years afterward, nothing much happened.
Lots of amazing things happened. Imagine watching it all happen. Given the data you had at each moment, how many complete shocks awaited you?
As the universe cooled, you'd see phase change after phase change where new behavior appeared, and probably you wouldn't have the data to have predicted those phase changes. How long before there were stable atomic nuclei? How long before everything wasn't a plasma? How long before chemistry? Stars? Supernova? Galaxies? Planets? Black holes? Pulsars?
I think that's a lot of amazing things to have happened.
Lots of amazing things happened. Imagine watching it all happen. Given the data you had at each moment, how many complete shocks awaited you?
Stephen Baxter does a very good job of evoking this in his SF anthology Vacuum Diagrams, I think, although of course we don't know there actually were such forms of life at each stage you mentioned. :)
Ooh, I read his novel Evolution and found it to be extremely enjoyable. It's the evolution of humans from a little ratlike mammal thing living through the KT-event, all the way through to modern humans and then speculative extension beyond - but each chapter is a narrative about some individual actual creature going through a significant event in its life, with realistic depiction of the increasing cognitive abilities (i.e. no sapient monkeys). I found it gave me an amazing subjective feeling of perspective on the evolution of primates and humans. Heartily recommended.
Today's post, The First World Takeover was originally published on 19 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
The first replicator was the original black swan. A couple of molecules that, despite not having a particularly good optimization process, could explore new regions of pattern-space. This is an event that would have implications that would have seemed absurd to predict.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Weak Inside View, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.