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Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...
Therefore, contact occurring within the Solar System, and especially in the immediate vicinity of Earth, is likely to be the most disruptive and negative for humanity. [23] On a smaller scale, people close to the epicenter of contact would experience a greater effect than would those living farther away, and a contact having multiple epicenters ...
The simplest types of control are negative and positive controls, and both are found in many different types of experiments. [2] These two controls, when both are successful, are usually sufficient to eliminate most potential confounding variables: it means that the experiment produces a negative result when a negative result is expected, and a ...
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.
In 1785, he stated that Earth was a superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology. [12]: 10 The Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by James Lovelock, suggests that life on Earth functions as a single organism that defines and maintains environmental conditions necessary for its survival. [13] [14]
The anthropic principle states that this is an a posteriori necessity, because if life were impossible, no living entity would be there to observe it, and thus it would not be known. That is, it must be possible to observe some universe, and hence, the laws and constants of any such universe must accommodate that possibility.
This group of organisms includes viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoans. While these pathogenic organisms can quickly adapt, other marine life is weakened by rapid changes to their environment. In addition, microbes are becoming more abundant due to aquaculture, the farming of aquatic life, and human waste polluting the ocean.
Examples of non-anthropogenic risks are an asteroid or comet impact event, a supervolcanic eruption, a natural pandemic, a lethal gamma-ray burst, a geomagnetic storm from a coronal mass ejection destroying electronic equipment, natural long-term climate change, hostile extraterrestrial life, or the Sun transforming into a red giant star and ...