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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 ...
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
A deeper understanding of developmental biology shows that common morphology is, in fact, the product of shared genetic elements. [5] For example, although camera-like eyes are believed to have evolved independently on many separate occasions, [ 6 ] they share a common set of light-sensing proteins ( opsins ), suggesting a common point of ...
Forests harbour most of Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world's biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world's forests. [78] A new method used in 2011, put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, of which 2.1 million were estimated to live in the ocean. [79]
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.
Earth system science – Scientific study of the Earth's spheres and their natural integrated systems; Extraterrestrial life – Life that does not originate on Earth; Information metabolism – Psychological theory of interaction between biological organisms and their environment; Organism – Individual living life form
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.