system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the earliest stage Carbon based life could arise in the Universe? 

Considering the Earth is 4.54 billion years young and the Universe is 13.75 ±0.17 billion years old, how soon could you estimate the earliest life arising when you have to take into account the first formation of Carbon and the formation of planets after the distribution of this carbon?
gpt
Pretty much when it did.

The synthesis of interesting elements requires conditions that were not present for very long during the Big Bang. So after the end of the Big Bang, around 400,000 years into the universe's history, there wasn't much around but hydrogen and helium. So the first stars that formed were probably *giants,* truly enormous stars of very low densities.

Inside those stars — which are called "population III" for historical reasons — hydrogen and helium were fused to create heavier atoms. In time, those first supergiant stars grew old and died, exploding to scatter their contents into vast nebulae.

But even then, we were still looking at mostly hydrogen and helium, and just traces of more interesting things like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. But new stars still formed out of the supernova remnants (and other remains) of population III stars, taking their turn at mashing lighter elements together to make heavier ones. These second-generation stars are called "population II," again for historical reasons.

Only once the population II stars had lived and died and scattered their contents into space was it possible for stars like our sun — "population I" stars — to form, and the chemically interesting planets that surround it.

If you were God, and you wanted to create people by laying down the laws of physics and setting the universe into motion — Big Bang, stars, nucleosynthesis and all that — then you really couldn't have gotten from the beginning of everything to *Blue Peter* very much faster than what occurred.