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The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that planets with complex life, like Earth, are exceptionally rare.. In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity, such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth, and subsequently human intelligence, required an improbable combination of astrophysical ...
Rare Earth was succeeded in 2003 by the follow-on book The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World, also by Ward and Brownlee, which talks about the Earth's long-term future and eventual demise under a warming and expanding Sun, showing readers the concept that planets like Earth ...
Michael Rowan-Robinson emphasizes the Copernican principle as the threshold test for modern thought, asserting that: "It is evident that in the post-Copernican era of human history, no well-informed and rational person can imagine that the Earth occupies a unique position in the universe." [7]
Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon. Earth orbits the Sun every 365.2564 mean solar days, or one sidereal year. With an apparent movement of the Sun in Earth's sky at a rate ...
What changed in the later 20th century is the perspective of geological study. Geology was now studied using a more integrative approach, considering the Earth in a broader context encompassing the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere. [42] Satellites located in space that take wide scope photographs of the Earth provide such a perspective.
The entire Earth contains over 75 billion tons (150 trillion pounds or about 6.8×10 13 kilograms) of biomass (life), which lives within various environments within the biosphere. [52] Over nine-tenths of the total biomass on Earth is plant life, on which animal life depends very heavily for its existence. [53]
Plate tectonics (from Latin tectonicus, from Ancient Greek τεκτονικός (tektonikós) 'pertaining to building') [1] is the scientific theory that the Earth's lithosphere comprises a number of large tectonic plates, which have been slowly moving since 3–4 billion years ago.
The principal sources of rare-earth elements are the minerals bastnäsite (RCO 3 F, where R is a mixture of rare-earth elements), monazite (XPO 4, where X is a mixture of rare-earth elements and sometimes thorium), and loparite ((Ce,Na,Ca)(Ti,Nb)O 3), and the lateritic ion-adsorption clays.