The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early

**For decades, we told ourselves a tidy story: the universe took its sweet time, slowly assembling massive galaxies before it could even consider mixing a pebble.** That patient cosmology has just been violently overturned. New observations reveal that the essential ingredients—the dust for rocky worlds, and crucially, the water for life—were already simmering in the cosmic broth a mere 100 million years after the Big Bang. That isn't just early; that's practically instantaneous on a cosmic clock. **Why does this matter?** Because it destroys our timeline of habitability. We assumed the universe needed complex galactic nurseries, generations of dying stars, and billions of years of heavy-element enrichment to bake a planet. Instead, the universe was preheating the oven before the kitchen was even built. It signals that the raw chemistry for life wasn't a lucky, late-breaking byproduct; it was a foundational, urgent feature of reality itself. This rewires the search for exoplanets—we may need to look at the very first flickers of starlight to find our true