We are so lucky that life on Earth has survived for so long – BGR

• Scientists have expended an incredible amount of manpower to determine what conditions support life and why Earth is so perfect for living things.
• Now a researcher has simulated 100,000 planets to try to determine how lucky we are that Earth has remained habitable for so long.
• As it turns out, we are incredibly lucky that the Earth appears to have a habit of making itself habitable again, even after catastrophic events.

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This should go without saying, but in case you haven’t considered it in a while, let me say it: we are really, really lucky to live on Earth. Earth is, as far as we know, the only planet to ever sustain life, and it has been for billions of years. That’s an incredible achievement and one that puts the Earth in a group of one.

That is not to say that life on Earth has always had it easy. In fact, our planet has faced many extinction-level events during its tenure as a bastion for life. However, it has always managed to bring things back to some sort of balanced state. Sure, it may have taken millions and millions of years for that to happen, but it always happened quickly enough for life to survive and thrive again. Now a scientist has taken it upon himself to see how lucky we are that Earth survived for so long without life being completely extinguished, and the data is incredibly interesting.

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Like Phil Plait from SYFY wire reports, the experiment is the subject of a new article published in Communications Earth & Environment. In the paper, researcher Toby Tyrrell explains that Earth, which has remained habitable for three to four billion years, was his desire to run a lot of simulations and see how happy Earth is.

The Earth’s climate has remained habitable continuously for 3 or 4 billion years. This poses a puzzle (the ‘habitability problem’) because loss of habitability appears to have been more likely. The brightness of the solar energy has increased by 30% during this time, which, if not countered, would have resulted in sterility. Additionally, Earth’s climate is dangerously balanced and could potentially deteriorate to deep-frozen conditions in as little as 1 million years. Here I present the results of a new simulation assigning randomly generated climate feedbacks to thousands of planets. Each planetary setup was tested to see if it remained habitable for a period of 3 billion years. The conventional view attributes the extensive habitability of the Earth only to stabilization mechanisms. The simulation results shown here instead show that chance also plays a role in the habitability results. The long-term habitability of the Earth was therefore most likely a contingent rather than an inevitable outcome.

Tyrrell assigned mathematical values ​​to the 100,000 virtual planets he simulated. Each planet’s climate was random in that some would have feedback loops similar to Earth’s – the Earth with too much CO2 would cause it to get too hot, produce even more CO2, etc. – while others would have others. would have variations. The actual climates were not simulated, but the values ​​representing the variables were assigned and then tracked as each planet was simulated 100 times.

The temperature of each planet was tracked for 3 billion (virtual) years. Of the absolutely massive number of simulated planets, only one planet managed to remain habitable during all 100 simulations. Other planets remained habitable during some simulated runs, but not others, but only 9% of the planets remained habitable for at least a 3 billion year period.

Needless to say, the fact that Earth has sustained itself through asteroid impacts, rapid cooling, and perhaps even a super volcano eruption or two has been very, very lucky. If one of those events had completely wiped out life, I wouldn’t have been here to write this, and you wouldn’t be reading it either.