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The field of astrobiology has made tremendous progress in modellinggalactic-scale habitable zones which offer a stable environment for life toform and evolve in complexity. Recently, this idea has been extended tocosmological scales by studies modelling the habitability of the local Universein its entirety (e.g. Dayal et al. 2015; Li & Zhang 2015). However, all ofthese studies have solely focused on estimating the potentially detrimentaleffects of either Type II supernovae (SNII) or Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs),ignoring the contributions from Type Ia supernovae (SNIa) and active galacticnuclei (AGN). In this study we follow two different approaches, based on (i)the amplitude of deleterious radiation and (ii) the total planet-hosting volumeirradiated by deleterious radiation. We simultaneously track the contributionsfrom the key astrophysical sources (SNII, SNIa, AGN and GRBs) for the entireUniverse, for both scenarios, to determine its habitability through 13.8billion years of cosmic time. We find that SNII dominate the total radiationbudget and the volume irradiated by deleterious radiation at any cosmic epochclosely followed by SNIa (that contribute half as much as SNII), with GRBs andAGN making up a negligible portion (<1%). Secondly, as a result of the totalmass in stars (or the total number of planets) slowly building-up with time andthe total deleterious radiation density, and volume affected, falling-off afterthe first 3 billion years, we find that the Universe has steadily increased inhabitability through cosmic time. We find that, depending on the exact modelassumptions, the Universe is 2.5 to 20 times more habitable today compared towhen life first appeared on the Earth 4 billion years ago. We find that thisincrease in habitability will persist until the final stars die out over thenext hundreds of billions of years.

The habitability of the Universe through 13 billion years of cosmic time