Astrobiology III: Why Earth?
After many tribulations, my astrobiology bloggery is back up and running using Wordpress rather than Blogger because Blogger is completely unusable these days. I’ve taken the opportunity of the move to make better graphs for my old posts.
“The Solar System: Why Earth?”
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/the-solar-system-why-earth/
Here, I try to look at our own solar system and what the presence of only ONE known biosphere, here on Earth, tells us about life and perhaps more importantly what it does not. In particular, I explore what aspects of Earth make it special and I make the distinction between a big biosphere here on Earth that has utterly rebuilt the geochemistry and a smaller biosphere living off smaller amounts of energy that we probably would never notice elsewhere in our own solar system given the evidence at hand.
Commentary appreciated.
Previous works:
Space and Time, Part I
https://thegreatatuin.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/space-and-time-part-i
Space and Time, Part II
Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:
The history of life on Earth and it’s important developments
The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically does exactly what I did a few months earlier with my calculations of our point in star and planet order, and extends it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
My thoughs on how SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox is ill-posed
Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence
Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?