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Earth is the only known place that has ever been habitable for life. Earth's life developed in Earth's early bodies of water some hundred million years after Earth formed. Earth's life has been shaping and inhabiting many particular ecosystems on Earth and has eventually expanded globally forming an overarching biosphere. [242]
It took 4.5 billion years before humanity appeared on Earth, and life as we know it will see suitable conditions for 1 [95] to 2.3 [96] billion years more. Red dwarfs, by contrast, could live for trillions of years because their nuclear reactions are far slower than those of larger stars, meaning that life would have longer to evolve and survive.
The Gaia hypothesis (/ ˈ ɡ aɪ. ə /), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
An artist's conception shows a terraformed Mars in four stages of development.. Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.
Land is often defined as the solid, dry surface of Earth. [1] The word land may also collectively refer the collective natural resources of Earth, [2] including its land cover, rivers, shallow lakes, its biosphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere (troposphere), groundwater reserves, and the physical results of human activity on land, such as architecture and agriculture. [3]
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Earth materials include minerals, rocks, soil and water. These are the naturally occurring materials found on Earth that constitute the raw materials upon which our global society exists. Earth materials are vital resources that provide the basic components for life, agriculture and industry .
The book also illustrates Earth's eventual fate by compressing its full 12 billion-year history into 12 hours on a clock, with the first life appearing at 1:00 am, the first animals and plants appearing at 4:00 am, and the present day being 4:29.59 am. The Earth is destroyed by the Sun at "high noon", though animals and plants come to an end by ...