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Earth is the place to be

04 Sept 2024

Is there life on other planets?

This is a question that man has attempted to answer for a very long time and we still have no absolutely proven answer.

On the face of it you would think that life must exist in numerous other places, given the incredible number of stars and their associated planets that exist in the universe. Surely, even if the odds are one in a billion, then there must be an incredibly high number of life-bearing worlds out there.

Yet, as we learn more about our own planet, we discover that it is an incredibly rare coincidence of factors that have created the life-friendly environment in which we live.

There are so many elements that must all be present at the right time and in the right proportions if life is to start and then evolve into an inteligent form.

Firstly, we need a friendly star. Not to hot, not to cold and sufficiently stable that we don't have rogue flares irradiating the surface of any planets with "the goldilocks zone".

Then we need a planet that is not too large nor not to small.

Large planets have too much mass for life as we know it. Any life would be unlikely to evolve beyond a simple single or low-multi-cellular form because gravity would crush larger creatures. The strong gravitation forces would also make for terrifying atmospheric pressures and gas-densities.

On the other hand, small planets are unable to keep an atmosphere due to the lack of gravity and thus it becomes harder for life to evolve beyond the very basics, if at all. A lack of pressure created by an atmosphere also makes it impossibe for liquid water to exist at life-sustaining temperatures. Any seas would simply boil away into space.

Even if you do have a medium-sized planet located within the goldilocks zone of a friendly star, life will still fail if that planet doesn't have a magnetic field to protect it from the radiation of its sun. Mars is a great example of this, having had its atmosphere largely blasted from it due to solar wind in the absence of any magnetic field to protect it -- despite its distance from that sun.

The reason I write about this today is the discovery of yet another seemingly unusal aspect to the way the earth is uniquely constructed to support life.

According to this report, scientists have discovered a "doughnut shaped region" just beneath the mantle of the planet and it is believed that this structure plays a crucial part in the creation of our magnetic field.

Despite our best technology and despite the fact that we're finding new exoplanets almost every day, we have yet to see any indication of other worlds that have exactly the same coincidence of "must haves" to sustain life as we know it.

I'm pretty sure that those who ascribe to religion will tout this as further proof that we were created rather than that we're simply an accident created by chance.

Who knows?

Of course all my rambling above is predicated on the premise that intelligent life, if it does exist out there, will be remarkably similar to life as we find it here on earth. This could be a mistake.

Our form of intelligent life may be just one of an almost infinite number and other forms may thrive in conditions that we would consider impossible. Who knows, there could be creatures that live deep beneath the clouds of gas giants or who thrive in the plasma of stars.

Perhaps, if we really wish to find other forms of intelligent life in the universe, we have to broaden our horizons somewhat and accept that even if we encountered such life forms, we may not recognise them as life.

Carpe Diem folks!

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