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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 ...
Lovelock formulated the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in 1972 [1] and 1974, [2] followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. An article in the New Scientist of February 6, 1975, [ 42 ] and a popular book length version of the hypothesis, published in 1979 as The Quest for Gaia , began to attract scientific and ...
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 ]
Theory of the Earth is a publication by James Hutton which laid the foundations for geology. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In it he showed that the Earth is the product of natural forces. What could be seen happening today, over long periods of time, could produce what we see in the rocks.
The diversity of life on Earth is a result of the dynamic interplay between genetic opportunity, metabolic capability, environmental challenges, [95] and symbiosis. [96] [97] [98] For most of its existence, Earth's habitable environment has been dominated by microorganisms and subjected to their metabolism
The Earth has many diverse ecosystems and ecologicalsystem diversity. These are NASA composite images of the Earth: 2001 (left), 2002 (right), titled The Blue Marble. Ecosystem diversity deals with the variations in ecosystems within a geographical location and its overall impact on human existence and the environment.
[8] Human preferences toward things in nature , while refined through experience and culture, are hypothetically the product of biological evolution. For example, adult mammals (especially humans) are generally attracted to baby mammal faces with their large eyes and rounded features and find them appealing across species.