- Scientists have spent an incredible amount of labor trying to determine what conditions support life and why the Earth is so perfect for living things.
- Now, a researcher has simulated 100,000 planets to try to determine how lucky we are that the Earth has remained habitable for as long as it was.
- As it turns out, we are extremely lucky that the Earth seems to have a habit of returning to habitability even after catastrophic events.
This should be taken for granted, but only if you haven’t considered it for some time will I continue to mention: We are really lucky to live on Earth. Earth, as far as we know, is the only planet that has ever sustained life and done so for billions of years. This is an incredible achievement and it puts the Earth in a group of one.
Now, that doesn’t mean that life on Earth has always been easy. In fact, our planet has faced many endangered events during its tenure as a bastion for life. However, he always managed to bring things back to a kind of uniform state. Sure, it would have taken millions and millions of years for this to happen, but it always happened fast enough for life to hang on and thrive once again. Now, a scientist has decided to see how lucky we are that the Earth has survived a long time, without life being completely destroyed, and the data are incredibly interesting.
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Like Phil Plait from SYFY wire reports, the experiment is the subject of a new paper published in Communications Earth & Environment. In the paper, researcher Toby Tyrrell explains that the Earth remained habitable for three to four billion years was what aroused his desire to run a lot of simulations and see how lucky the Earth is.
The Earth’s climate has remained continuously habitable for 3 or 4 billion years. This presents a puzzle (the “housing problem”), because the loss of housing seems to have been more likely. The sun’s brightness increased by 30% during this time, which, if not counteracted, would have caused sterility. Moreover, the Earth’s climate is poorly balanced, and can deteriorate to deep freezing conditions in just 1 million years. Here I present the results of a new simulation in which thousands of planets have been allocated randomly generated climate feedback. Each planetary structure has been tested to see if it has remained habitable for 3 billion years. The conventional view attributes the extended housing of the Earth only to stabilization mechanisms. The results of the simulation presented here show instead that chance also plays a role in habitability outcomes. Therefore, the long-term habitability of the Earth was most likely a contingent, rather than an inevitable result.
Tyrrell assigned mathematical values to the 100,000 virtual planets he simulated. The climate of each planet was randomized in the sense that some would have feedback loops similar to Earth – Earth with too much CO2 would cause it to heat up too much, producing even more CO2, and so on. – while others would have different variations. Real climates were not simulated, but the values representing the variables were assigned and then tracked, because each planet was simulated 100 times.
The temperature of each planet has been tracked for 3 billion years (virtual). Of the absolutely huge number of simulated planets, only one planet managed to remain habitable during the 100 simulations. Other planets remained habitable during simulated runs, but not others, but only 9% of the planets remained habitable during a round of at least 3 billion years.
Needless to say, the fact that the Earth was sustained by asteroid impacts, rapid cooling and maybe even a super-volcano eruption or two is very, very lucky. If any of these events had completely erased my life, I would not have written here and you would not have read it.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games over the past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, portable devices, smartphones and future technology. Most recently, Mike served as technical editor at The Daily Dot and was featured in USA Today, Time.com, and countless other websites and prints. His love of reporting is second only to gambling addiction.