From the book
RARE EARTH
by Ward and Brownlee
Messengers
from the
Stars
Our planet is not in a special place in the solar system, our
Sun is not in a special place in our galaxy and our galaxy is
not in a special place in the Universe.
—Marcello Gleiser, The Dancing Universe
Some things have to be experienced firsthand, for some wonders, no written description or photograph can substitute—the birth of one's child, for example, or the first music heard from an actual orchestra, love, sex, standing before a Monet canvas. One such revelation not so often experienced, is one's first glimpse of the starry night through a telescope.
Viewing the Universe
We have all seen photographs of endless star fields, galaxies, and nebulae. But no matter how great their beauty, the stars in photographs are lifeless, and no view of the night sky with the unaided eye, even in the clearest atmosphere, is like the first view through a small telescope. If looking at the Milky Way with the unaided eye is akin to snorkelling on a coral reef, then adding a telescope is like strapping on scuba tanks: We are no longer tied to the surface but can roam the depths of the star fields and see unimagined splendors amid stars whose numbers are beyond belief.
Even with a low-power telescope a new vision emerges, the uncountable pinpricks of light now revealed are seemingly alive, in no way diminished by their passage through corrected lenses. In fact, the stars gain strength, color, and clarity. But the greatest and most lasting impression is the increase in their sheer numbers. The superb double-star cluster in Perseus changes from a dull, unresolvable glow to bountiful diamonds sprinkled on black velvet, the globular cluster in Hercules is transformed from a tiny smudge to scattered grains of light. With time and experience, even greater vistas open up. We discover the joys of other deep-space objects, galaxies and nebulae. And eventually, in the Northern hemisphere, we inevitably find ourselves slowly moving through the crowded star fields of Sagittarius on a dark summer night, the light from this luminous expanse of stars sweeping the senses like a wind, nebulae and galaxies an endless visual melody punctuated by staccatos of brighter suns.
Those in the Southern hemisphere witness even more dramatic vistas: the two great Magellenic Clouds looming so close overhead. It becomes spectacle, overwhelming, and ultimately—diminishing. The myriad stars overcome us, so utterly do they trivialize (marginalize? minimize?) our small planet and we who stare out.
The Universe seems to be finite, there are not an infinite number of planets circling the vast number of stars in the ocean of space. But the numbers are immense beyond understanding. We are one of many planets. But as we have tried to show in this book, perhaps not so many as we might hope— and perhaps not so many that we will ever, however long the history of our species, find any extraterrestrial animals among the stars surrounding our sun. That is a fate not foreseen by Hollywood—that we may find nothing but bacteria, even on planets orbiting distant stars.
If the Rare Earth Hypothesis is correct—that is, if microbial life is common but animal life is rare—there will be societal implications, or at least some small personal implications.
What will be the effect if news comes back from the next Mars mission that there is life on Mars after all—microbial to be sure, but life. Or what if, after astronauts voyage repeatedly to other planets in our solar system, or even to the dozen nearest stars, we find nothing more advanced than a bacterium? What if, at least in this quadrant of the galaxy, we are quite alone, not just as the only intelligent organisms but also as the only animals? How much of our striving to travel into space is the hope of discovering—and perhaps talking to—other animalia?
Views of Earth Through Human History
Since the time of the Greeks, science has tried to make sense of the Universe and of our place in it. More than two millennia ago, a Greek named Thales of Miletus, credited by many as the founder of Western philosophy, was among the first to leave a record of his musings about the place of Earth in the cosmos. Thales thought that the cosmos was an organic, living thing, and in that he may not have been far wrong if bacteria or bacteria-like organisms are as common as we believe them to be in the Universe. Thales's student Anaximander was among the first to place Earth at the center of the cosmos, postulating that Earth was a floating cylinder with a series of large wheels with holes in them rotating around it. The Pythagoreans tried to break from this central-Earth motif, proposing that Earth moved in space and was not the center of the Universe. But Earth's centrality was restored by members of Plato's school and became exalted by the students of Aristotle. Eudoxus placed Earth at the center of 27 concentric spheres, each of which rotated around it. Soon two schools of thought competed: the "sun-centered" model of Aristarchus and the Earth-centered model of Ptolemy. The latter held sway through the Middle Ages.
During the Middle Ages, Earth was not only regarded as the center of the Universe but was again believed to be flat. St. Thomas Aquinas made Earth a sphere again but codified its place as the center of the Universe. It was Nicholas Copernicus who finally shattered the notion of an Earth-centered Universe and put the sun at the center of all orbits. But even with this great leap forward, the sun remained at the center of the Universe as well, according to Copernicus in his revolutionary book of 1514, Commentariolus.
Copernicus forever destroyed the myth that our Earth lay at the center of the Universe, with the sun and all other planets and stars revolving around us; his work eventually led to the concept of a "Plurality of Worlds"—the idea that our planet is but one among many. This has now been described as the "Principle of Mediocrity," also known as the Copernican Principle. Yet an even greater blow came with the invention of the telescope. There is still debate about who built the first optical telescope, although Dutch optician Johannes Lippershey obtained the first official license for construction of a telescope in 1608. The device was an immediate sensation, and by 1609 this revolutionary new instrument found its way into the hands of Galileo, who built his own soon after hearing of the concept. Before Galileo, telescopes had been used to assess the terrestrial world (and for various military applications), but Galileo pointed his into the heavens and forever changed our understanding of the cosmos.
Galileo quickly surmised that there are far more stars in the sky than anyone had guessed. He discovered that the Milky Way is made up of uncountable individual stars. He observed the Moon, discovered satellites revolving around Jupiter (and in so doing showed that our Earth could just as conceivably orbit the sun). Earth's central place in the Universe, the fervent belief of Aristotle, was now observationally shown to be wrong. Copernicus had dealt with theory, Galileo and his telescopes dealt with reality. Galileo's message, published in his booklet Siderius nuncius, or "Messenger from the Stars," was about the truth told by the stars: that Earth is but one of many cosmic objects. To illustrate his point, he noted the presence of faint patches of light just visible to the unaided eye—objects called nebulae. Even with his primitive and tiny telescopes, Galileo could see these curious objects far better than anyone before. He thought them to be great masses of stars, made indistinct by their very distance.
The decentralization of Earth continued in relentless fashion. In 1755 Immanuel Kant theorized that a rotating gas cloud would flatten into a disk as it contracted under its own gravity. Kant was familiar with the numerous nebulae of the night skies, the faint glowing patches of luminosity scattered through the heavens. All the early astronomers knew of the faint cloud in the constellation of Andromeda. He knew these objects to be one of many distant groups of stars he called "island Universes." But Kant didn't stop there: He theorized that the sun, Earth, and other planets might have formed in this swirling mass of gas. This concept was taken a step further by Pierre-Simon de Liplike, who speculated in detail about how planetary systems might form from nebular origins. He invoked a dynamical mechanism for the formation of stars and their planets. Earth and the solar system became one of many such systems all formed in the same way.
[IT IS INDEED POSSIBLE THAT GOD FORMED GALAXIES ETC. OVER VAST PERIODS OF TIME, I MEAN WHAT IS BILLIONS OF YEARS IN ETERNITY. BUT THEN GOD MAYBE SPOKE AND IT WAS DONE, WITH AGE IMPRINTED IN STARS AND PLANETS AND MOON. CERTAINLY WE KNOW TODAY THE UNIVERSE IS A LIVING AND DYING PLACE, DEATH OF STARS AND BIRTH OF NEW ONES, AS THE GALAXIES MOVE AWAY AND OUTWARD FROM EACH OTHER, AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE, THAT HAS SHOCKED SCIENTISTS WHEN THAT WAS DISCOVERED - Keith Hunt]
But how far away were these island Universes? Was there only a single galaxy in the Universe, of which our star was part, or were there many? This debate was not resolved until the early twentieth century, a time when gigantic new telescopes were being constructed and outer space was being probed as never before. The conflict came to a head on April 26, 1920, when Harlow Shapley from the Mount Wilson observatory in California and Heber Curtis from the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh met before the members of the National Academy of Sciences, a clash that came to be known as the Great Debate. The debate ended inconclusively, because it was not yet possible to assess the distance of the nebulae. That soon changed, however, thanks to the efforts of astronomer Edwin Hubble. Using a newly constructed, 100-inch reflecting telescope, Hubble was able to make observations that proved conclusively that the island nebulae were not associated with our Milky Way but were far-distant objects. Even the closest, the Andromeda galaxy, was found to be at least 2 million light-years from Earth and similar in shape to our Milky Way galaxy. The debate was over. The Milky Way is one of a vast number of scattered and widely separated galaxies floating in space. We became even more trivialized—now out galaxy was but one of many.
[AND THE DISTANCES BECAME MIND-NUMBING; I MEAN HOW CAN THE HUMAN MIND GRASP A 2 MILLION LIGHT-YEARS TO OUR NEAREST GALAXY— ANDROMEDA—— THAT DISTANCE IS UNREAL BUT IT IS REAL. 2 MILLION YEARS OF MOVING AT THE LIGHT OF SPEED [186,000 MIKES A SECOND], BEFORE YOU CAN REACH ANDROMEDA - Keith Hunt]
Two millennia of astronomers and philosophers removed Earth from the center of the Universe and placed us orbiting a sun that is but one of hundreds of billions in a galaxy itself but one among billions in the Universe. And it was not only astronomers who changed the world view. Einstein showed that there is no preferred observer in the Universe, and quantum mechanics told us that chance is king. Charles Darwin and his powerful theory of evolution demoted humans from the crown of creation to a rather new species on an already animal-rich planet, the chance offspring of larger-scale evolutionary and ecological forces. Nothing special. And yet. . .
The great danger to our thesis (that Earth is rare because of its animal life, the factors and history necessary to arrive at this point as a teeming, animal and plant-rich planet being highly improbable) is that it is a product of our lack of imagination. We assume in this book that animal life will be somehow Earth-like. We take the perhaps jingoistic stance that Earth-life is every-life, that lessons from Earth are not only guides but also rules. We assume that DNA is the only way, rather than only one way. Perhaps complex life—which we in this book have denned as animals (and higher plants as well)—is as widely distributed as bacterial life and as variable in its makeup. Perhaps Earth is not rare after all but is simply one variant in a nearly infinite assemblage of planets with life. Yet we do not believe this, for there is so much evidence and inference—as we have tried to show in the preceding pages—that such is not the case.
[AS I’VE STATED, GOD MAKES IT PLAIN THAT HUMAN LIFE WAS ONLY CREATED ON THIS TINY BLUE PLANET, FOR HE HAS A MIGHTY HUGE PLAN FOR MANKIND, SO MIGHTY AND GLORIOUS IT MAKES THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE SEEM LIKE NOTHING IN COMPARISON. AND THIS EARTH IS PLANNED TO BE EVENTUALLY THE VERY PLACE WHERE THE GOD FAMILY WILL MAKE THEIR CENTRAL HOME IN THE VAST ENDLESS UNIVERSE - Keith Hunt]
Our Rare Earth
Let us recap why we think Earth is rare.
Our planet coalesced out of the debris from previous cosmic events at a position within a galaxy highly appropriate for the eventual evolution of animal life, around a star also highly appropriate—a star rich in metal, a star found in a safe region of a spiral galaxy, a star moving very slowly on its galactic pinwheel. Not in the center of the galaxy, not in a metal-poor galaxy, not in a globular cluster, not near an active gamma ray source, not in a multiple-star system, not even in a binary, or near a pulsar, or near stars too small, too large, or soon to go supernova.
We became a planet where global temperatures have allowed liquid water to exist for more than 4 billion years—and for that, our planet had to have a nearly circular orbit at a distance from a star itself emitting a nearly constant energy output for a long period of time. Our planet received a volume of water sufficient to cover most—but not all—of the planetary surface. Asteroids and comets hit us but not excessively so, thanks to the presence of giant gas planets such as Jupiter beyond us. In the time since animals evolved over 600 million years ago, we have not been punched out, although the means of our destruction by catastrophic impact is certainly there. Earth received the right range of building materials—and had the correct amount of internal heat—to allow plate tectonics to work on the planet, shaping the continents required and keeping global temperatures within a narrow range for several billion years. Even as the Sun grew brighter and atmosphere composition changed, the Earth's remarkable thermostatic regulating process successfully kept the surface temperature within livable range. Alone among terrestrial planets we have a large moon, and this single fact, which sets us apart from Mercury, Venus, and Mars, may have been crucial to the rise and continued existence of animal life on Earth. The continued marginalization of Earth and its place in the Universe perhaps should be reassessed. We are not the center of the Universe, and we never will be. But we are not so ordinary as Western science has made us out to be for two millennia. Our global inferiority complex may be unwarranted. What if Earth is extremely rare because of its animals (or, to put it another way, because of its animal habitability)?
[THESE SCIENTISTS STILL TEACH A LONG EVOLUTION PROCESS FOR ANIMAL LIFE, INTO HUMAN LIFE. THAT IDEA IS COMPLETELY FALSE! HOW FAR BACK THIS EARTH GOES IN THE AGE BEFORE GENESIS 1, IS NOT REVEALED TO US; ONE DAY WE SHALL KNOW, WHEN THE CHILDREN OF GOD ARE BORN INTO HIS FAMILY. AS PAUL SAID, FOR NOW, WE LOOK INTO A GLASS DARKLY, BUT ONE DAY WE SHALL KNOW EVEN AS WE ARE KNOWN - Keith Hunt]
The possibility that animal life may be very rare in the Universe also heightens the tragedy of the current rate of extinction on our planet. Earlier, we suggested that the rise of an intelligent species on any planet might be a common source of mass extinction. That certainly seems to be the case on Earth. And if animals are as rare in the Universe as we suspect, it puts species extinction in a whole new light. Are we eliminating species not only from our planet but also from a quadrant of the galaxy as a whole?
To understand the rates of extinction on Earth today, one has only to examine the plight of tropical rainforests. Forests have been a part of this planet for more than 300 million years, and although the nature of species has changed over that long period, the nature of the forests has changed little. The forests are the great Noah's ark of species on this planet. Although the land surface of our globe is only one-third that of the oceans, it appears that 80% to 90% of the total animal and plant biodiversity of the planet inhabits the land, and most of that diversity is found in tropical forests. As we destroy these forests, we destroy species. It has been estimated that between 5 and 30 million species of animals live in the tropical rainforests and that only about 5% of these are known to science. The fossil record tells us quite clearly that the world has attained the highest level of biological diversity ever in its history. There are also disturbing and unmistakable signs that this plateau in the number of species on Earth has been crested and the biodiversity of Earth is diminishing.
There appear to be several forces driving a reduction of biodiversity—a destruction of biodiversity, to be less delicate.
The most important seems to be the rapid increase in human population. Ten thousand years ago there may have been at most 2 to 3 million humans scattered around the globe. There were no cities, no great population centers. There were fewer people on the globe than are now found in virtually any large American city. Two thousand years ago the number had swelled to perhaps 130 to 200 million people. Our first billion was reached in the year 1800. If we take the time of origin of our species as about 100,000 years ago, it seems that it took our species 100,000 years to reach the billion-person population plateau.
Then things sped up considerably. We reached 2 billion people in 1930, about 1000 times faster than it took to reach the first billion. But the rate of increase kept accelerating. By 1950, only 20 years later, we had reached 2.5 billion souls. In 1999, we hit 6 billion. There will be approximately 7 billion people by 2020 and perhaps 11 billion by 2050 to 2100.
Rainforest conversion, which changes forest to fields, and then (usually) to overgrazed, eroded, and infertile land within a generation, is perhaps the most direct executioner of biodiversity. It appears that 25% of the world's top-soil has been lost since 1945. One-third of the world's forest area has disappeared in the same interval. The result is species extinction. A thousand years from now, when humanity reflects on the world that was, and looks out at the desert surrounding the rare and notably less diverse animals that remain, whom will it hold responsible?
[FORTUNATELY THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! FOR GOD THE FATHER WILL SEND JESUS THE CHRIST BACK TO EARTH, TO ESTABLISH THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH; YES A NEW AGE IS COMING—— AN AGE OF WONDERMENT, PEACE, JOY, HEALTH, PROSPERITY, AND NO MORE WAR, BUT EVERYONE LOVING EACH OTHER, SERVING EACH OTHER; IT WILL BE AN AGE OF THE MIND OF MAN FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT; WANTING TO LIVE THE WAY, THE COMMANDMENTS, THE STATUTES, THE PRECEPTS, THE JUDGEMENTS OF THE ETERNAL GOD; AN AGE THAT NOW IS HARD TO COMPREHEND AS WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF SIN AND WICKEDNESS; BUT THAT AGE WILL COME; THE PROPHECIES OF THE BIBLE ARE BEING FULFILLED, AND WE ARE LIVING AT THE END OF THIS AGE, THAT WILL BLOSOM OUT FROM A DESTRUCTION INTO THE PROMISED AGE TO COME - Keith Hunt]
President Theodore Roosevelt closed off the Yellowstone region to development in forming the first national park in the United States. Wouldn't it be ironic if some alien equivalent had done the same thing for our planet? As-trobiologists have suggested this—it is known as the Zoo Hypothesis. The joke would be on us: We are somebody's national park, our rare planet Earth stocked with animals for safekeeping. Perhaps that is why we have yet to hear any signals from space. A big fence surrounds our solar system: "Earth Inter-galactic Park. Posted: No trespassing or tampering. The only planet with animals for the next 5000 light-years."
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EVOLUTIONISTS ARE ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT LIFE BEGINNING IN THE SEA. SEA LIFE EVOLVING INTO LAND LIFE AND THEN AIR LIFE, AND OVER FAST AMOUNTS OF TIME, SLOWLY EVOLUTION MADE HUMANKIND.
THERE ARE MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THIS IDEA.
ALL THE PROGRAMS I’VE WATCHED AND LISTENED TO OVER THE PAST DECADES, ABOUT THIS EVOLUTION OF LIFE FROM THE SEA INTO HUMAN LIFE AS WE KNOW IT TODAY, NEVER MOVES INTO TRYING TO EXPLAIN HOW “SEED” LIFE EVOLVED INTO THE VAST NUMBER OF DIFFERENT TREES FROM FOREST TREES TO ORCHARD TREES, AND SEEDS FROM GRASS TO FERNS. HOW DID THE WHEAT SEED COME INTO BEING DIFFERENT FROM THE CORN SEED, OR BARLEY SEED, OR FLAX SEED, OR RICE SEEDS. JUST THINK ABOUT ALL THE SEEDS THAT MAKE UP OUR VAST ARAY OF VEGETABLES, AND FRUITS. HOW DID SOME SEEDS TEACH THEMSELVES TO LAY DORMANT FOR YEARS UNTIL THE RIGHT WEATHER CONDITIONS CAME ABOUT, AND THEN BUD FORTH? HOW DID SOME FLOWERS TEACH THEMSELVES TO BE POLLENATED BY THE BEES AND OTHER FLYING INSECTS? WHO TOLD THE BEES TO COLLECT THEIR FOOD FROM FLOWERS. WHICH CAME FIRST AS THEY SAY, THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?
ON AND ON IT CAN GO. WITH JUST A LITTLE MEDITATION THE IDEA OF VERY SLOW, STEP BY STEP EVOLUTION JUST DOES NOT MAKE ANY LOGICAL SENSE.
THERE ARE MOVEMENTS IN DNA, TO BE SURE; WE HAVE DOGS OF DIFFERENT SIZES AND SHAPES, BUT THEY ARE STILL DOGS; THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT DOGS TURNED INTO CATS, OR CATS EVOLVED INTO DOGS—— WE STILL HAVE ABSOLUTE LAWS THAT ARE “AFTER THEIR KIND”—— COWS DO NOT BREED WITH HORSES; ELEPHANTS DO NOT BREED WITH HIPPOPOTAMUSES; THE EAGLE DOES NOT BREED WITH DUCKS—— AND ON AND ON IT GOES.
WHERE DID GRAVITY COME FROM THAT IS THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE?
WHO PUT THE LIFE-SPAN INTO STARS, EVENTUALLY DYING AND EXPLODING?
WHO SET THE GALAXIES EXPANDING OUT FROM EACH OTHER, AN EVER EXPANDING UNIVERSE?
THERE ARE SO MANY “HOWS” AND “WHYS” OF THE UNIVERSE. WE KNOW SOME OF THE ANSWERS TO THE “HOW” OF THINGS [LIKE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE MAKE-UP OF OUR SUN], BUT AS FOR SOME OF THE “WHYS” —— THAT IS ANOTHER QUESTION OFTEN MUCH HARDER TO ANSWER, LIKE WHY DID THE UNIVERSE BEGIN WITH A “BIG BANG” AS MOST SCIENTISTS CLAIM IT DID, A HUGE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING, WHICH THE BIBLE ALSO TEACHES WAS HOW THE UNIVERSE CAME INTO BEING.
THE BOOK “THE RARE REATH” DOES INDEED SHOW FROM A PHYSICAL SCIENCE UNDERSTANDING, THAT LIFE AS WE KNOW IT ON THIS EARTH, MAY INDEED BE UNIQUE IN THE UNIVERSE.
Keith Hunt
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