Earth May Be The Only Inhabitable Planet Ever Found

For science and technology geeks, this is interesting news – Planet Earth may be the only planet that can harbor life, ever. If this is true, this makes Earth particularly unique and special and will dash the hopes of ever finding organic life forms anywhere else.

The reason is the liquid-water phase that comes from a warm planet. For organic life to exist, a planet must not be too hot or too cold – and it must have liquid water. It was previously thought that this would occur in what is now known as the “Goldilocks zone” where a planet is at just the right distance from a nearby star to warm up and melt water, but it turns out that more then this is required.

Carbon dioxide is yet another requirement for organic life (which is carbon based), which can occur from volcanic eruptions. Without this element and activity, there would be no life. Planets would either go from an icy-frozen state to one which they heat up too rapidly. Atmospheres must both insulate and protect a planet for life to form, but even these can be literally blown away from solar activity.

Earth was an example of an icy world that thawed just enough, some 600-800 million years ago, thanks to planet-warming atmospheric greenhouse gases emitted by volcanic eruptions during its snowball phase, the team said.

This meant that less solar heat would have been required for the ice to melt, enabling our planet to achieve a temperate middle ground.

Greenhouse gases, which are naturally present in the atmosphere but also released by humans burning coal, oil and gas, are what has kept our planet warm enough for humans, animals and plants to inhabit.

But humankind’s addition of mainly CO2 since the Industrial Revolution has caused the atmosphere to retain ever more solar heat, to a point that scientists say we are harming Earth’s perfectly-balanced climate beyond repair. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-planets-hospitable-earth.html

The bottom line is Earth may be incredibly unique, having once had the perfect balance of conditions for life to form, but now, that balance is being pushed to hellish conditions where life may extinguish because of too-much heat is being trapped.