Here's a researcher reporting that the livable period on earth is 90% over, suggesting that technolife just barely squeaked in under the wire:
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Sunday, 20 February, 2000, 16:51 GMT
Date set for desert Earth
By BBC News Online's Damian Carrington in Washington DC The Earth is entering the final 10% of its lifespan, according to a US meteorologist.
However, well before the planet is left as an arid desert, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be too low to support plant life, destroying the foundation of the food chains.
"The Sun, like all main sequence stars, is getting brighter with time and eventually temperatures will become high enough so that the oceans evaporate," said Dr Kasting. At 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit), water becomes a major constituent of the atmosphere. Much of this water drifts up to the stratosphere and is lost into space. Eventually, all the oceans will leak out of the Earth's grasp. Burnt-out planet "Astronomers always knew that the oceans would evaporate, but they typically thought it would occur only when the Sun left the main sequence - that will be in five billion years."
Stars leave the main sequence when they stop burning hydrogen. The Sun will then become a red giant, swamping and obliterating Mercury. Venus will lose its atmosphere and become a burnt-out planet.
"However, my calculations show the oceans may evaporate much earlier," said Dr Kasting. "They are somewhat pessimistic and present a worst-case scenario, but they say a billion years." The earlier loss of carbon dioxide will occur because as the climate gets hotter and wetter, more rock is weathered by rain. This dissolves carbon dioxide and hides it away on the ocean floor as calcium carbonate. "Obviously, a billion, even a half billion years, is a long way off in the future," said Dr Kasting. "But these models can help us refine our understanding of the time that a planet remains in an orbit where life can exist." "If we calculated correctly, Earth has been habitable for 4.5 billion years and only has a half billion years left." Dr Kasting's comments were made at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. |
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Mars: Will Earth look like this?
The Sun will consume Mercury
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We apparently got very lucky with the K-T boundary hit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000313081731.htm Asteroid Devastation Could Even Be Worse Than Feared CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers say in a new report that if a huge asteroid were to hit the Earth, the catastrophic destruction it causes, and even the "impact winter" that follows, might only be a prelude to a different, but very deadly phase that starts later on. They're calling it, "ultraviolet spring." In an analysis of the secondary ecological repercussions of a major asteroid impact, scientists from Oregon State University and the British Antarctic Survey have outlined some of the residual effects of ozone depletion, acid rain and increased levels o f harmful ultraviolet radiation. The results were just published in the journal Ecology Letters. The findings are frightening. As a number of popular movies have illustrated in recent years, a big asteroid or comet impact would in fact produce enormous devastation, huge tidal waves, and a global dust cloud that would block the sun and choke the plane t in icy, winter-like conditions for months. Many experts believe such conditions existed on Earth following an impact around the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T boundary, when there was a massive extinction of many animals, including the dinosaurs. That's pretty bad. But according to Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University, there's more to the story. "Scientists have pretty well documented the immediate destruction of an asteroid impact and even the impact winter which its dust cloud would create," Blaustein said. "But our study suggests that's just the beginning of the ecological disaster, not the e nd of it." Blaustein and colleague Charles Cockell examined an asteroid impact of a magnitude similar to the one that occurred around the K-T boundary, which is believed to have hit off the Yucatan Peninsula with a force of almost one trillion megatons. The immediate results would be catastrophic destruction and an impact winter, with widespread death of plants and the large terrestrial animals - including humans - that most directly depend on those plants for food. That's the beginning of an ugly scena rio, the researchers say. As a result of the impact, the atmosphere would become loaded with nitric oxide, causing massive amounts of acid rain. As they become acidified, the lakes and rivers would have reduced amounts of dissolved organic carbons, which would allow much greater p enetration of ultraviolet light. At first, of course, the ultraviolet rays would be blocked by the dust cloud, which sets the stage for a greater disaster later on. Many animals depend on some exposure to ultraviolet light to keep operational their biological protective mechanisms agains t it - without any such light, those protective mechanisms would be eroded or lost. During the extended winter, animals across the biological spectrum would become weaker, starved and more vulnerable. Many would die. Then comes ultraviolet spring, shining down on surviving plants and animals that have lost their resistance to ultraviolet radiation and penetrating more deeply, with greater intensity, into shallow waters than it ever has before. "By our calculations, the dust cloud would shield the Earth from ultraviolet light for would cause levels of ultraviolet radiation to at least double, about 600 days after impact." According t photosyntheto stress here is that with an asteroid collision, there will be many synergistic effects on the environment that go far beyond the initial impact," said Cockell, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey who did some of th is analysis while formerly working with NASA. "Effects such as acid rain, fires, the dust clouds, cold temperatures, ozone depletion and ultraviolet radiation could all build upon each other." During the K-T event, the scientists said, many of the animals may actually have been spared most of the ultraviolet spring they envision. That impact, oddly enough, hit a portion of the Earth's crust that was rich in anhydrite rocks. This produced a 12-y ear sulfate haze that blocked much of the ultraviolet radiation. But it was a lucky shot - that type of rock covers less than 1 percent of the Earth's surface. So when the next "big one" comes, the scientists said, the ecological repercussions may be more savage than any of those known in Earth's long history. The collision will be devastating, the "impact winter" deadly. But it will be the ultraviolet spring that helps finish off the survivors.
Sounds like we're a bit lucky our beast isn't feeding: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000322091619.htm Astronomers Discover "Feeding" Mechanism For Black Holes COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Astronomers at Ohio State University used an innovative imaging technique to discover swirling masses of interstellar dust spiraling into the center of nearby galaxies. The researchers believe this interstellar dust is feeding supermassive black holes. Despite mounting circumstantial evidence that black holes occupy the heart of most galaxies, astronomers haven't seen compelling evidence of the material that might "feed" those black holes until now. Their study appeared in a recent issue of the Astronomical Journal. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Richard Pogge, associate professor of astronomy, and Paul Martini, astronomy graduate student, devised a plan to point two cameras -- one that records visible light and one that records infrared -- at nearby galaxies that may contain supermassive black holes. They combined infrared and visible-light images to create single images of the interstellar dust clouds in the centers of these galaxies. "Imagine if we could take a picture that showed only the dust in a galaxy," said Pogge. "We can't exactly do that, but we can get pretty close." The Hubble telescope enabled the Ohio State astronomers to zero in on the very center of 24 nearby spiral-shaped galaxies with extremely bright centers. Astronomers believe the centers of these galaxies are bright because they contain active supermassive black holes consuming matter from their surrounding galaxies. Astronomers call a black hole "active" when its powerful gravity tears material apart, releasing radiation and brightening the galaxy's center. Only 1 percent of galaxies that should contain supermassive black holes appear to be in an active state. Most pictures of these active galaxies show the giant arms of gas and dust that give spiral galaxies their shape. Pogge and Martini focussed instead on only the central 1,000 light years -- approximately 1 percent of the total diameter of these galaxies. "We looked at a region people were unable to study before," said Martini. Within 20 of the 24 galaxies they photographed, they saw a secondary, mini-spiral of dust that appeared to go directly into the center where the supermassive black hole resides. These "nuclear spirals" may be the feeding mechanism that activates black holes, Pogge and Martini said. Black holes like the one in our own Milky Way may be inactive, Pogge said, because they aren't receiving any nourishment from their host galaxy. "Before black holes become active, you have to feed them," Pogge said. And supermassive black holes have voracious appetites. Astronomers calculate that black holes must consume stars, gas, or dust in amounts up to the mass of our sun every year to remain active. Martini explained that over time the material in an inactive galaxy may reach an equilibrium in which it orbits the central black hole at a distance just out of the hole's reach. The black hole wouldn't receive any fuel, he said, until some kind of disturbance triggered an avalanche of material into the center. The disturbance could come in the form of a collision with ano propagate and have a very large effect." Pogge and Martini think the nuclear spirals form when material orbiting near the centers of , Pogge, Msse galaxies lack the mini-spiral structures seen in their brighter cousins.
This one looks significant, but I've no clue what to conclude: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/03/000329080630.htm Meteoroid Bombardment Of Moon Has Intensified In Past 500 Million Years, Coinciding With Blossoming Of Life On Earth BERKELEY (3/9/00) -- A new chronology of meteoroid impacts on the moon shows some surprising correlations with major biological events on Earth. By dating minute glass beads thrown out by impacts over the millennia, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Geochronology Center have not only confirmed expected intense meteor activity 4 to 3.5 billion years ago, when the large lunar seas or maria were formed, but have discovered another peak of activity that began 500 million years ago and continues today. The tapering off of the first peak of activity, which probably included many large comets and asteroids, coincides with the earliest know evidence of life on Earth. The second and ongoing peak, which from the evidence seems to have been mostly smaller debris, began around the time of the great explosion of life known as the Cambrian. "The first life on Earth arose just after this real crescendo around 3.5 billion years ago," said Paul R. Renne, adjunct professor of geology and geophysics at UC Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center. "Maybe life began on Earth many times, but the meteors only stopped wiping it out about 3 billion years ago." The more recent and ongoing activity is even more intriguing. "It's not surprising that the impacts tapered off about 3 billion years ago. The solar system was just getting cleaned up, primarily by Jupiter and the Sun," said Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley and a research physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "What is surprising is the reversion from a benign to a violent solar system about 500 million years ago. "This work opens up a new field that tells us something about the history of our solar system that was totally unanticipated. Until now we did not realize how peculiar the past 500 million years has been." UC Berkeley graduate student Timothy S. Culler, along with Renne, Muller and Timothy A. Becker, laboratory manager at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, report their findings in the March 10 issue of the journal Science. Though all the Berkeley researchers agree on the new impact chronology for the moon, they have their own ideas about its implications. Renne, for example, leans toward the theory that interstellar dust seeded the Earth with organic molecules, from water to amino acids, that were incorporated into life on Earth during the past 500 million years. "Life already here would suddenly have a new stimulus, a greater need to evolve quickly and more raw material to do it," Renne said. "Impacts would have to be really, really big and really, really frequent to be deleterious to life on Earth, and it's clear that the flux over the past 500 million years has been relatively small objects. We don't see a lot of young large craters on the moon. We've come to accept the idea that impacts are strictly bad news for life on Earth, but now that's not so clear." Culler, the graduate student who originated the project under the supervision of Muller and Renne, sees the intense meteor activity as evidence that large meteor impacts played a major role in the evolution and extinction of life. "It shows that large impacts may have been more frequent in the last 500 million years, creating more extinctions, like the comet or asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, " Culler said. "Even a number of smaller impacts can have a disastrous effect on the atmosphere and cause mass extinctions." Muller too emphasizes the role impacts have played in the history of life on Earth. It's not surprising that the recent intense period of meteor activity coincides with the rapid radiation of life on Earth, he said. "We're only beginning to realize the role played by catastrophe in the evolution of life," he said. "When it comes to survival of the fittest, it's not only the ability to compete with other species that counts, but also the ability to survive occasional catastrophe. That requires complexity and flexibility." Muller has proposed several controversial theories about the solar system, including that the sun has an unseen companion star, one he calls Nemesis, that orbits the sun every 26 million years and periodically knocks comets out of their orbits, sending them hurtling toward the inner solar system. He also has proposed that periodic climate changes are the result of the Earth's orbit periodically tilting up out of the orbital plane of the planets and intersecting a cloud of dust, debris and meteoroids. The current research was suggested by Muller in 1991, in part as a way to determine whether the moon's impact record shows evidence of a 26 million-year cycle. Muller hit upon the idea of argon-40/argon-39 dating of lunar spherules as a way to get a more precise chronology of the intensity of bombardment of the moon and, by implication, the Earth. "I realized that we didn't have to go to the individual craters in order to determine their age, because the craters sent samples to us," Muller said. "We could obtain samples of hundreds of different craters from just one location, without having the expense of going back to the moon. This idea is likely to open up a completely new round of lunar analysis." Spherules are mostly basaltic glass, Culler said, created when a meteor hits the surface and generates intense heat that melts the rock and splatters it outward. As droplets of molten rock fall back to the surface they quickly cool to form a glass, much like obsidian. Culler, Becker and Renne analyzed 155 beads from one gram of lunar soil picked up in 1971 by Apollo 14 from the Fra Mauro formation - a lunar highland bordering Mare Imbrium. The mineral composition of each bead was determined with a microprobe before it was laser melted and the argon gas captured for isotopic analysis. Contrary to assumptions, they found that the cratering rate on the moon has not been constant over its history. Approximately twice as many impacts occurred between 4 and 3 billion years ago as occurred between 2 and 1/2 billion years ago. About 500 million years ago the intensity of impacts increased nearly to what it was at the peak of activity 3.2 billion years ago. Though the dating method was not sensitive enough to reveal a 26 million-year cycle in th For the future, Renne says, it is "critical to launch new lunar sampling missions targeted to areas rich in potassium," in order to confirm the results and probe further back into the moon's history. The project was funded by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, through the Berkeley Geochronology Center and Richard Muller. NASA provided the lunar samples.
From ionus@... Fri Mar 31 18:12:07 2000 To: cynbe@laurel.actlab.utexas.edu Subject: unusual solar composition brick Did we already discuss the apparent fact that the sun is 50-100% richer in metals than 'average' stars its age? I forget where this info comes from, but I've seen it cited as a well-established fact. If that's the case, it certainly is another 'order of magnitude' reducer in the complex life equation, since a metal-rich protostellar nebula is pretty clearly essential to the formation of earthlike planets. [...] David Studhalter The Radio Ionus News Service of Earth
(The 2000Jul Scientific American also notes that the Sun is unusually metal-rich.)
Physics News Update The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 491, June 29, 2000, 2000 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A Hofstra-Williams-Colgate-Manchester (UK) team of astronomers have used the National Radio Astronomy Observatory 12-m radio telescope to scan a huge molecular cloud only 30 light years from the galactic center. In particular they look at the spectra of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and its deuterium counterpart DCN. In general stars are expected to be net consumers (not producers) of deuterium: they burn it into helium. But the galactic center is the Times Square of the Milky Way; it is the scene of jets, bursts, x-ray and gamma sources, a massive black hole, filaments, arcs, and other material-processing objects. From their observed ratio of deuterium-to-hydrogen D/H, the researchers (Don Lubowich, Jay Pasachoff, Tom Balonek, and Tom Millar) deduce three things: (1) The D/H ratio is higher than you would expect in the absence of a source of virginal unprocessed material (high in D, low in heavier elements). This demonstrates that matter comparatively rich in D is indeed raining down with the cloud onto the plane of our galaxy (see figure at Physics News Graphics). In other words, the infalling matter is to the galaxy what comets are to our solar system: specimens of relatively unprocessed, primitive material. (2) For all that, the D/H ratio at the galactic center is lower than in all other places in the galaxy. This is important evidence confirming that D is not made in stars and that what D we see is made by the big bang. (3) From models of D production in quasars, the observed D/H ratio suggests that the Milky Way could not have harbored a quasar for at least a billion years and probably not for four billion years. (Lubowich et al., Nature, 29 June 2000.)
2001-Feb-05: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1154000/1154784.stm "Recent calculations of the Solar System's stability indicate that if the Earth was removed then Venus and Mercury would become destabilised in a relatively short time."
2001-02-16: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/05/inbrief.020901/#1 Report: Giant planets may be key to life (CNN) -- The hunt for distant planets similar to Earth should concentrate on solar systems with planets the size of Jupiter, according to a new astronomical report. Such jovian giants could fling celestial objects the size of Mars toward their central star, transporting the water necessary for carbon-based life to form on smaller terrestrial worlds, planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine said last week. Scientific evidence strongly suggests a similar chain of events produced our own solar system, the University of Arizona researcher said. As the solar system formed, Jupiter's powerful gravity spurred asteroids to clump together into increasingly larger objects, prototypical rocky worlds, he said. Jupiter then tossed the terrestrial "embyros" into the inner solar system. Those that hit our planet carried the water that now fills Earth's oceans, according to the theory. The report by Lunine and his colleagues is in the January 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This supports the notion that one rock hitting the right spot at the right time would have eliminated humans at almost any time but the last few millenia: EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) -- Modern Europeans, and maybe populations in other parts of the world, are descended from no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago, new research suggests. Organization, the international collaboration researching the genetic makeup of the human race, provide the first estimate of how many people founded Europe. They are also a blow to the theory that modern humans evolved simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia from multiple early humans. "I think this certainly rules that out, at least in respect to Europe," said study leader Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research. "We're not sure whether this was just the founding of Europe or whether, in fact, this small bottleneck represents all the people leaving Africa." Lander's study involved comparing about 300 chromosomes from people in Sweden, central Europe and Nigeria. The differences in the genetic pattern between the European and African chromosomes revealed how long ago Europeans left Africa and about how many there must have been. The pattern showed that the Europeans were descended from fewer ancestors than the Africans -- an evolutionary bottleneck, Lander said. "It's hundreds, not thousands," Lander said. The Nigerian chromosomes had been well shuffled around, which indicates a wide gene pool and a long breeding history, while the European chromosomes had long stretches of unshuffled genetic material, indicating a much smaller number of chromosome types entering the mix. Eddy Rubin, a scientist who was not involved in the study, said he thinks the findings are accurate. "The evidence is overwhelming that present-day Europeans come from a very small group that stayed small for a while, then expanded," said Rubin, head of the human genome center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Lander said the findings had much broader applications. "We are going to be able to do this throughout much of the rest of the world. The data will be able to rule it in or out for the other populations very quickly," Lander said. "We're still in the early days for this, but it is remarkable how much the human chromosomes can be read as a history book," he continued. "We are going to be able to say how populations are related to each other, when people arrived there and how many people likely arrived in different places." The human race numbers 6 billion people today, but it largely has the genetic variation of a population of a few tens of thousands, Lander said. -- http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/04/20/human.origins.ap/index.html
More evidence of how amazingly closely synchronized human civilization
has been worldwide -- climate is the only obvious clock which could
have done this, suggesting just how critical favorable climate has
been to the development of technolife here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1298000/1298460.stm
Oldest civilisation in the Americas
Aerial view: Caral's huge central plaza, surrounded by large pyramids,
seen here as earth mounds An ancient city in what is now Peru was
built at the same time as the great pyramids of Egypt, archaeologists
have revealed.
New evidence indicates the desert site at Caral, on the slopes of the
Andes, was built between 2,600 BC and 2,000 BC.
This date pushes back the emergence of the first complex society in
the New World by nearly 800 years.
And it suggests that the people behind the project were advanced
enough to organise the labour needed to create the architectural
wonder of the day.
Caral is one of 18 sites in central Peru's Supe Valley, which
stretches eastward from the Pacific coastline, up the slopes of the
Andes.
Earth pyramids
All the inland settlements once had architecture on a grand scale,
including the six huge platform mounds seen at Caral.
Because of its size and complexity, archaeologists had thought Caral
was built about 1,500 BC.
But carbon dating of plant samples found at the site add another 1,000
years or so to this figure.
That puts Caral in the same period as the great pyramids of Egypt, and
long before the huge stone structures of Mexico.
"What we're learning from Caral is going to rewrite the way we think
about the development of early Andean civilisation," said study leader
Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago, US.
The Peruvian-American archaeological team says the pyramids and
irrigation system show an organised society in which masses of people
were paid, or compelled, to work on centralised projects.
This suggests that power and wealth were held by an elite group at a
time when, in most of the Americas, people were still hunting and
gathering in much smaller communities.
'Power'
"The size of a structure is really an indication of power," said Haas.
"It means that leaders of the society were able to get their followers
to do lots of work."
What is surprising to archaeologists is that the city was created by a
society that had yet to invent pottery or cultivate grain.
Its people grew peppers, beans, avocadoes and potatoes - all of which
they roasted, having no pots to boil them in.
They also ate lots of anchovies, which may have been used in dried
form as a kind of currency, as grain was later.
The research is published in the journal Science.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010504083512.htm
Latest Investigations Of Orion Nebula
Lower Odds Of Planet Formation
In 1993, when the Hubble Space Telescope surveyed the Orion nebula
for the first time, its images provided a substantial boost for the
argument that stars with planetary systems are commonplace in the
galaxy. Now, however, the most recent analyses of one the youngest,
closest and brightest nebulae cast doubt on that conclusion and suggest
that planets may be far rarer than astronomers have thought.
The Orion nebula is the closest example of a stellar nursery. Stellar
nurseries are special regions where the vast majority of new stars in the
galaxy are born. Interstellar clouds of molecular gas form, produce
thousands of new stars and then gradually dissipate. The nebula in
Orion is 1,500 light years from Earth and six light years or 35 trillion
miles across. It forms the second point of light in the hunter?s scabbard
in the Orion constellation. The Trapezium Cluster at the nebula?s
center contains more than 1,500 stars. Four massive young stars
illuminate the nebula, making it possible to observe many objects that
would normally be invisible. The starlight they produce is so intense, in
fact, that it ionizes thin layers of the gas in the region, producing a
rainbow of colors. So it?s not surprising that studies of Orion have
provided astronomers with some of the best information about the
process of star formation.
The first Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images found that up to 90
percent of the young stars in the nebula are surrounded by
"protoplanetary disks"-disks of dust and gas from which planets can
form. Astronomers call such star and disk systems "proplyds." Based on
the assumption that similar conditions prevail in other stellar nurseries,
the finding strengthened the hypothesis that planet production is a
common side effect of the star formation process.
C. Robert O?Dell, lead scientist on the first HST studies of Orion and
now a research professor at Vanderbilt University, has been studying
the nebula since 1964. In a May 1 presentation at the annual meeting of
the American Physical Society in Washington D.C., O?Dell reports
that the most recent studies of Orion appear to have come up with a
planet stopper. The youngest and brightest stars in the cluster are so
powerful that the ultraviolet radiation they produce should blast away
the dust and gas surrounding newly formed stars before they can form
planets.
"According to current estimates, it takes about 10 million years for a
planet to form," O?Dell says. "The massive, young stars in Orion are
more than 100,000 times as luminous as the sun. Our best estimate is
that these radiation levels can destroy a protoplanetary disk in a few
hundred thousand years. So it appears that most of the disks will be
gone long before planets can form."
A critical factor in this calculation is the length of time it takes planets
to develop. If planets form considerably faster than scientists currently
think, then the percentage of stars that develop planetary systems could
be substantially higher, O?Dell acknowledges.
Over the last eight years, O?Dell and W. J. Henney at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico at Morelia-working with graduate
students from Rice University and UNAM-have used a combination of
optical and radio telescope data to construct a detailed,
three-dimensional map of the nebula. Using this map, he estimates that
only 10 percent of the proplyds in the nebula are shielded from the
erosive star-shine.
If planetary formation times are correct, and the conditions in the
Orion nebula are typical of stellar nurseries, then only one star in 10 is
likely to form a planetary system, O?Dell says.
Why then does Orion contain more than 300 circumsolar disks? The
answer, according to O?Dell, is quite surprising. One of the stars in
Trapezium turns out to be a binary. By carefully measuring the
properties of this pair of stars, Francesco Palla at the Osservatio
Astrofisico di Arcetri in Italy and Steven Stahler at the University of
California, Berkeley have estimated that it can be no older than 100,000
years. Orion?s massive central stars must be even younger, O?Dell
contends, because they have created an intense radiation environment
that has essentially shut down star formation in the nebula.
"This estimate, combined with the fact that we don?t see any evidence
for depletion of the protoplanetary disks, even those exposed to the
highest radiation levels, suggests that the central stars are even younger,
perhaps only a few tens of thousands of years old," O?Dell says. The
fact that these stars may not be any older than mankind itself doesn?t sit
well with the astronomer. It goes against the Copernican principle.
Copernicus argued that the Earth wasn?t the center of the universe but,
rather, that the Earth orbits around the Sun. Since then this has been
generalized to the Copernican principle: There is nothing special in
time or space about Earth?s position in the universe.
"It is unlikely that homo sapiens and the Orion nebula should be formed
at just about the same time, but perhaps we are just lucky," O?Dell says.
By BBC News Online's Helen Briggs A mysterious disturbance in the forces at the heart of the Solar System could have triggered the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. This intriguing new theory has been put forward by scientists who have calculated the paths of the planets over the past 100 million years. A US team believes a change in the dynamics of the Solar System caused Mercury, the Earth and Mars to veer off course. This could have pushed a giant asteroid towards our planet, spelling downfall for most living things, 65 million years ago. The idea has been floated by a team of astrobiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), based on simulations of the historical positions of the major planets. "Our best calculations show that the dynamical state of the inner Solar System changed abruptly about 65 million years ago," said Bruce Runnegar, director of UCLA's centre for Astrobiology. Chaos theory The event modified the average orbit of Mercury, Mars and the Earth in significant ways, he said, possibly perturbing asteroids in the inner part of the asteroid belt and throwing one or more of them into Earth-crossing orbits. "Thus, the ultimate cause of the K-T impact [and the demise of the dinosaurs] may have been caused by a chaos-induced change in Solar System dynamics," Dr Runnegar told BBC News Online. The basis of the theory, deduced by team members Ferenc Varadi and Michael Ghil, is chaos in the Solar System. Under this scenario, a small shift in the orbit of one or more planets could destabilise much of the Solar System. To test their theory, the researchers simulated the orbits of the major planets, working back in history over tens of millions of years. To their surprise, computer models pointed to a change in the dynamics of the inner Solar System at the time of the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) mass extinction, about 65 million years ago, when many plants and animals suddenly became extinct. Dr Runnegar said they were now carrying out further studies to test their theory. "At the moment the link with the dinosaurs is based on a coincidence in time and a plausible mechanism," he added. 'Tenuous' link The research, presented at the Earth System Processes meeting in Edinburgh, UK, has received a mixed reaction from other experts. Professor Mark Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Armagh, said the asteroid link appeared tenuous, but not impossible. "[It] relies not least on the assumption that the killer projectile was an asteroid and not a comet," he told BBC News Online. "Nevertheless, the idea that the resonant frequencies of the Solar System change chaotically on time-scales of tens to hundreds of millions of years (albeit only slowly and by relatively small amounts) is an interesting one which adds yet another wrinkle to the story of our changing Solar System." Professor Carlos Frenk, an astrophysicist at the University of Durham, UK, said the theory appeared plausible. "If these calculations are correct, they are very revealing of the unusual past behaviour of the Solar System," he told BBC News Online. "The past history of the Solar System was not as quiet as we thought - this very unusual chaotic behaviour may have happened on our doorstep."
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s327749.htm ET can't call us if he's wet Thursday, 12 July 2001 The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is probably a complete waste of time because any Earth-like planets harbouring life will be too wet to support the kind of technology needed to "speak" to us. That's the essence of a presentation expected to stimulate "spirited discussion" at an international conference on life in the universe, to be held at Sydney's Macquarie University today. The global effort to scan the cosmos for radio signals from intelligent beings on other planets is based on the belief that a myriad of earth-like planets exist which might harbour life wanting to let us know they are "out there". Other projects assume extra-terrestrials will communicate using modulated gravity waves, laser beams, and neutrino particles. But Melbourne planetary scientist Dr Nick Hoffman will tell the Astrobiology Australasia workshop that even the smartest beings could not develop the technology to support such communication systems if they were under water. In a poster presentation, La Trobe University's Dr Hoffman will reveal new calculations showing the odds of land forming on other Earth-like planets are "infinitesimally" small. Instead they would be landless waterworlds. "'Waterworlds are the most likely outcome of planet formation. If you?re in the sea, you cannot discover fire, so you cannot melt metal to build machinery, you cannot discover electricity and you cannot build computers," Dr Hoffman told ABC Science Online. "Sitting here, waiting for someone to 'phone' us up is a waste of time." The presence of land on our planet is a direct result of an extremely rare kind of collision with asteroids during its formation, Dr Hoffman says. This collision led to the formation of our unique type of moon, which is made of materially formerly part of the primitive Earth's outer crust. The dislodged crust created space on the planet's surface into which oceans could drain. Without that space, the entire surface of the Earth would be covered with water, except for the tops of the highest mountains which would have been eroded by waves. Dr Hoffman conceded that searching for life in the universe "gave people something to look forward to" and so probably did no harm. But he felt the only real way to discover other civilisations was to "go there, land on their waterworld and see them."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020109074626.htm
Source:
Johns Hopkins University (http://www.jhu.edu)
Date:
Posted 1/9/2002
Ancient Supernova May Have Triggered Eco-Catastrophe
An exploding star may have destroyed part of Earth's protective ozone
layer 2 million years ago, devastating some forms of ancient marine
life, according to a new theory presented at this week's meeting of
the American Astronomical Society.
The new theory brings together puzzling clues from several different
fields of research, including paleontology, geology and astronomy.
Narciso Benitez, an associate research scientist in astronomy in the
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University,
says the "missing smoking gun" that brought the clues together was the
revelation that a stellar cluster with many large, short-lived stars
prone to producing supernovae had passed near Earth's solar system
several million years ago.
That discovery, made by co-author and Space Telescope Science
Institute astronomer Jesus Maiz-Apellaniz, led Benitez to check the
scientific record for potential effects of nearby supernovae on the
Earth.
"Nobody had realized that this cluster of stars that Jesus had
tracked, which is known as the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association,
could have been so close to Earth during the past several million
years," Benitez says. "And when I did a search, one of the first
things that popped out was a 1999 finding where a team of German
astronomers led by Klaus Knie detected the presence of a highly
unusual isotope of iron in samples of the Earth's crust drilled from
the deep ocean bottom."
Knie had proposed that the iron isotope was debris from a recent
supernova explosion that took place close to Earth. But astronomers
had no plausible candidates for such a nearby explosion until
Maiz-Apellaniz's work with the Scorpius-Centaurus association, which
is also being presented at this week's meeting of the American
Astronomical Society.
Benitez compared data produced by Maiz-Apellaniz and Knie's results,
and found "very good agreement, both in the amount of iron deposited
and in its time distribution."
Benitez consulted with his wife, Matilde Canelles, an immunologist at
the National Institutes of Health who had done her master's thesis on
microscopic algae, to learn if the paleontological record included an
extinction that had unusual characteristics suggestive of a potential
link to a supernova.
"Such an extinction would have had especially pronounced effects on
the plankton and the marine organisms," Benitez explains.
Canelles pointed out that evidence existed for a widespread extinction
of plankton and other marine organisms about 2 million years ago, and
noted that scientists are still debating the possible causes of the
event.
"Based on the minimal distance we expected for a supernova in the
Scorpius-Centaurus association at that time, I then did some
calculations to explore the potential effects on Earth," says Benitez.
He found that cosmic ray emissions from a supernova could have had a
potentially devastating effect on the Earth's ozone layer, an upper
layer of the atmosphere that absorbs harmful ultraviolet emissions
from the sun and other sources.
"This would have produced a significant reduction in phytoplankton
abundance and biomass, with devastating effects on other marine
populations, such as bivalves," Benitez says.
Benitez emphasizes that the theory, while provocative, is consistent
with the paleontological evidence, and also with the pattern of
movement of the Scorpius-Centaurus group, which would have been at its
closest to Earth at that time.
He concedes, though, that more evidence will be needed to firmly
establish the theory. In particular, more detailed searches for
supernova-produced isotopes in the geological record would show
whether there was a tight temporal correspondence between the
supernova explosion and the extinction event. Isotope searches could
also offer crucial information about the physical processes involved
in supernova explosions.
"People study supernovae using telescopes and supercomputer
simulations. In the future, some of the most relevant information in
this field may be found in the deep ocean floor," says Benitez.
While the new theory may further heighten concern about human impacts
on the ozone layer today, Benitez and Maiz-Apellaniz say there's no
need to worry about another supernova in the Scorpius-Centaurus group
affecting Earth in the near future. The next star due to explode in
the association, Antares, is now located at a distance of almost 500
light-years, which is too far away to have a significant effect on our
planet.
This research was funded by an Advanced Camera for Surveys grant from
NASA, the Johns Hopkins Center for Astrophysical Sciences, and a grant
from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1975000/1975354.stm
Cosmic catastrophe 'a certainty'
By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor
Sooner or later, a catastrophe from space will wipe out almost all
life on Earth.
According to Dr Arnon Dar, of the Technion Space Research Institute,
Israel, a particular type of exploding star going off anywhere in our
region of the Universe would devastate our planet.
Using the latest statistics and calculations, he argues that a
supermassive star collapsing at the end of its lifetime would form a
black hole and send out a beam of destructive radiation and particles
that would sterilise any planet in its path.
The odds are that any planet in our galaxy would be affected about
once every one hundred million years. "It is a certainty; the
timescales are comparable to mass extinctions seen in Earth's
geological record," Dr Dar told BBC News Online.
No hiding place
Supermassive stars, those with a mass substantially greater than our
Sun, are scattered throughout the galaxy. It is thought that when they
collapse at the end of their lives, they eject an intense beam of
radiation, called gamma-rays, into space.
So powerful are these gamma-rays, and the energetic sub-atomic
particles that follow in their wake, that they could have a major
influence on life in our galaxy.
"If such a beam were to strike Earth, the effects would be totally
devastating, unlike anything we could imagine," Dr Dar said.
On the side of Earth facing the explosion, searing shock waves will
begin to rip through the atmosphere igniting infernos when they reach
the ground.
Within moments of the arrival of the radiation from deep space, the
atmospheric temperature will begin rising rapidly, wreaking havoc with
global weather systems.
Destructive 'daughters'
All organic material on the surface of Earth will start to burn.
Survivors will cower in caves and buildings. But the worst is yet to
come.
The initial gamma-ray burst will last a fraction of a second. Almost
immediately afterwards will come the cosmic rays, which will drench
our planet for days. There will be no hiding place.
Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles travelling through space at
almost the speed of light. They will slam into the atmosphere,
depositing vast amounts of energy and creating swarms of destructive
"daughter" particles.
These particles, called muons, will penetrate hundreds of metres into
rocks so that few caves will offer protection and even deep-sea
creatures will be affected by lethal doses of radiation.
The Earth's ecosystem will be destroyed. "The few who might survive
will wish they had died," said Dr Dar. "They will struggle, forlornly,
on a wrecked planet."
Dr Dar points out that many of the great extinctions that regularly
punctuate the Earth's history are consistent with being caused by a
devastating influx of radiation from space.
Threatening stars
"Direct proof that it happened this way is lacking at present," he
said, "but many people are looking for it."
There is some good news! Because the gamma-ray bursts from collapsing
supermassive stars are shot across the cosmos in narrow beams,
probably no more than a degree across, most of them will miss the
Earth.
However, the latest statistics suggest once every one hundred million
years or so, we will be unlucky. Curiously, this is about the rate of
global extinctions on Earth.
At the moment, astronomers do not know which star to watch. Stars,
like the supermassive Eta Carinae, visible in the Southern Hemisphere,
are likely to explode and send out a gamma-ray burst sometime in the
next million years or so. But this particular star is not pointing in
our direction.
Undoubtedly, there is a star that is, but as yet astronomers have not
found it. But even if they do, will we get any warning?
"Not with our current understanding of science," said Dr Dar, "but
then science progresses. Perhaps, one day we will be able to tell
which stars are threatening."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/goldilocks_zone_020528-1.html
Amid the Universe's Chaos, a Few Habitable Places
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 28 May
2002
It took 4.5 billion years for Earth to generate and evolve a life form
that could think, reason, and finally fly off the planet. That's a
long time, even by cosmic measures. Perhaps too long.
At a time when the only known sentient species has earnestly and
optimistically begun to search for life on other planets, several
scientists within that species have found a host of reasons to guard
the optimism. Throughout the galaxy, hazards to planet formation and
sustained evolution are so serious and varied that life may be
exceedingly rare. Intelligent life, presumably, would be the rarest of
all.
We may, it turns out, be very lucky to be here. However, we may also
turn out to be very alone.
Location, location, location
Guillermo Gonzalez, an Iowa State University expert in stellar
evolution, says there are relatively small bands and patches of the
Milky Way Galaxy that he considers to be habitable regions. There are
places where conditions are just right for the formation of planets
and where things stay calm enough, long enough, to allow the evolution
of anything but the lowest forms of life.
Our Sun happens to be in one of these Goldilocks zones. For now, at
least.
Gonzalez has examined the structure of the galaxy and the amount of
heavy elements distributed through it. The central region of the
galaxy, he says, is far to cramped and chaotic to expect Earth-like
planets to have much chance of developing and remaining stable.
Planetary systems, if they are like ours, are expected to include
outer belts of comets, like our own Oort cloud which extends beyond
Pluto. Near the center of the galaxy, which all astronomers agree is
more densely packed with stars, close encounters between stars would
gravitationally boot more of these comets into the inner reaches of a
solar system, where the planets would be.
Further, because there is a greater concentration of heavy elements --
carbon, iron and other stuff that weighs more than hydrogen and helium
-- near the galactic center, Gonzalez said more comets and asteroids
would probably develop.
"Comet showers should be more common," Gonzalez said at a meeting
titled "Astrophysics of Life" earlier this month at the Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI).
Conversely, the outer reaches of the galaxy are relatively lean in the
heavier elements, making planet formation difficult according to
present theories. Other researchers have doubted this assertion,
suggesting that regardless of the abundance of heavy elements in a
star's environment, the quantities can vary greatly within a solar
system, as has been observed in our own.
Galactic Habitable Zone
There are other hazards, however. The pronounced spiral arms of the
Milky Way are regions where star formation is more frequent and
intense. As with the center of the galaxy, gravitational chaos and
heavy radiation in the arms is not conducive to long-running
biological evolution.
Between the spiral arms is the only safe place, Gonzalez has been
saying in recent years.
However, while stars orbit the galactic center, they are all on
different courses in relation to the spiral arms and the main, fairly
flat disk of the galaxy. Some stars, during their lifetimes, cross the
spiral arms, and others do not. Other stars travel above, below and
perilously through the main plane.
The Galactic Habitable Zone, which it has come to be called is, then,
actually several shifty places whose bounds are as-yet unclear.
"We don't know where it is exactly," Gonzalez said. "We think it's in
the thin disk of the galaxy. It excludes the center of the galaxy, and
it excludes the outer edge of the galaxy."
And where are we?
"We're between spiral arms. We're going to stay between spiral arms
for a long time."
Though Gonzalez figures the Sun "undoubtedly" experienced more
dangerous regions of space in the past, he says it isn't possible to
figure out where we were prior to a few hundred million years
ago. What he does know is that our solar system moves around the
galaxy at a pace and direction that is similar to the nearest spiral
arms, so we will not soon crash through one or be overtaken.
Bully stars
Like Gonzalez, John Bally would love to know where the Sun was
born. Bally, of the University of Colorado, examines the birthplaces
of stars and has learned that the vast majority are generated from
giant clouds of hydrogen that spawn not one, but many stars in a huge
and dense nursery of nearly simultaneous birth.
It's anything but a pleasant womb.
The clusters are violent, chaotic places whose largest stars --
superhot, massive, short-lived objects -- bathe the smaller ones in
heavy doses of ultraviolet radiation that can destroy the seeds of
planets before they ever form.
Here's what happens:
When stars form, some or perhaps most leave a circle of debris -- gas
and dust -- that develops into rotating mass called a protoplanetary
disk. From this material, planets, asteroids and comets are thought to
form. At least that's how it probably happened in our solar
system. Scientists are only beginning to spot and study these dusty
disks around other, relatively nearby stars, and they've seen clumps
that hint at planets in the making.
But nearby stars share the relative calm pocket of space -- one of
Gonzalez's habitable zones -- that our Sun benefits from. Most star
formation occurs in clusters, and it the bulk of it takes place in the
spiral arms.
In these clusters, a few massive stars shine thousands or even
millions of times more brightly than our Sun. Their UV radiation eats
away at the dust disks of other stars, and can strip the planetary
seeds from all nearby stars over the course of a million years or
less.
Meanwhile, other wild interactions are taking place in the dense star
clusters. When a cloud of hydrogen forms stars, it does so because it
contracts and begins to spin. Clumps of greater density form here and
there, Bally explained, and these clumps gain spin and collapse to
form stars.
"Nearby interactions with multiple stars in a rich cluster can
truncate and even completely eliminate protoplanetary disks," Bally
said.
All the while, the rotation and gravitational forces can fling stars
hundreds of light-years from their birthplaces. After a few million
years, many of the stars escape the worst radiation environments. And
the large, bully stars pay a price for all their energetic activity --
they typically die within 40 million years.
In an interview, Bally said his research and that of others shows that
around most stars, there is a tight time constraint on when planets
must form before the star's dust disk is blown away.
"I'm not saying planets can't form," he said. "But you have only
100,000 years to a million years."
Given the roughly 300 billion stars in our galaxy, Bally's limits
would still allow for plenty of planets out there, but it could also
mean there are far fewer than some researchers have expected. "Either
planetary systems form very fast," Bally said, "or we will find planet
development to be rare. Something like 5 percent of stars will have
planets."
However, if a planet can form quickly -- and theorists are not sure
just how long this process takes -- then the radiation is irrelevant,
Bally said, and his constraints would be largely lifted.
Our own Sun may have been born in a cluster and later tossed out, but
Bally said it's not yet possible to figure out if that was the case.
Other perils
If a planet finds itself around a star that fortuitously plans to hang
out for a long time in a habitable zone of the galaxy, its odds of
supporting life -- especially any kind of intelligent life -- are
still slim. One only needs consider our own solar system, where
intelligent life exists on just one out of nine planets.
Most planets probably do not end up in habitable zones around their
stars -- slim orbital paths where radiation from the star is just
enough to support life but not so much that it evaporates the oceans
away. [The terms "habitable zone" and "Goldilocks zone" were
originally devised to describe these favorable swaths around stars.]
Problem is, planetary habitable zones shift, too.
Kevin Zahnle, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said
our Sun has gotten significantly brighter during its roughly 4.6
billion-year life. It emits 30 to 40 percent more radiation than when
Earth was born. Luckily, and possibly because life is present and
moderates the change by evolving and modifying the atmosphere, Earth's
surface temperature has remained about the same, he said.
Until other possible Earth-like planets are found and studied, no one
can say whether it is commonly possible to preserve such a delicate
balance.
Eventually, Earth will be overwhelmed by the change. Within the next 5
billion years or so, the aging Sun will have swollen so much that it
envelops and vaporizes Earth. In just a billion years, the Sun could
be 11 percent brighter than now, turning the planet into an
inhospitable greenhouse. Had it taken another billion years for
humans to evolve, only some real lowlifes would have been around to
deal with the problem.
Only the smart survive
Long before we fry, another asteroid or comet will strike Earth. Every
100,000 years or so, leading experts agree, an impact large enough to
threaten civilization occurs. If other planets are anything like our
own, they too would face this peril of bombardment.
Christopher Chyba of the SETI Institute has theorized that only the
smart can survive. A civilization must evolve to the point that it can
detect and then either detour or destroy threats from space, lest it
be rendered extinct or, at best, plunged back into a Dark Ages
existence.
"There is a kind of selection effect for long-lived civilizations,"
Chyba said in comments to a group of reporters during the STScI
conference. "If you want to be long lived, you need to become
technical because you need to be able to observe the impact
environment around you and respond to that environment in some way to
mitigate its effects on your planet."
Chyba pointed out that it took 700 million years or so for life to
begin on Earth. The planet had to cool down after its initial
formation, and then it weathered a barrage of asteroid impacts. The
largest objects might well have evaporated the oceans, he said,
preventing the origin of life or resetting it if it had already
occurred.
"Our solar system tells you that life isn't going to be much younger
than a billion years," Chyba said. "It's going to take that long for
the planet to be capable of supporting life at all. It couldn't be
10,000 years. It couldn't be a million years."
Even in an ideal world, there are hazards and limits to life at both
ends. Along the way, it is no picnic. Life is tough, these theorists
all recognize. But it is not impossible. At least one planet has
proved that.
According to this, Earth should get sterilized only once every
billion years or so, which is hardly a problem at all. :)
If I recall correctly, there has only been metazoan land-life
on the Earth for about 700 million years. If this report is
correct, perhaps that is all the time you get to evolve
technolife, before the next nearby supernova resets you back
to bare rock:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s739717.htm
Threat to Earth from supernova blast falls Wednesday, 4 December 2002
The likelihood of a supernova explosion that would strip off the
Earth's protective ozone layer for decades and imperil life has been
reduced to a remote threat, according to new calculations by American
astrophysicists.
The new study, to be published in the March 2003 issue of the
Astrophysical Journal, has calculated that a supernova blast would not
be as damaging, and its range would be lower, than first thought.
To damage our ozone layer, a star would have to go supernova within 25
light years of Earth, which dramatically reduces the chances of an
event to once every 700 million years or so. What's more, there are no
stars likely to go supernova within a 25 light-year radius, the
authors said.
Previously, scientists had calculated that a supernova could be 50
light years away and still emit enough gamma rays and other cosmic
radiation to erase most of our ozone layer for decades, exposing the
Earth's surface to harmful ultraviolet light from the Sun and damaging
cosmic rays from space.
Some scientists have suggested that supernova blasts may have played a
part in past extinction events on Earth.
Dr Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland,
USA, and colleagues used a detailed computer model of the atmosphere
to gauge how nitrogen oxides - created by gamma rays striking the top
layers - would destroy ozone.
"They found the effect was much less significant than was previously
estimated," said Dr Chris Tinney, the head of astronomy at the
Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney. "The [supernova] would have
to be twice as close to have the same effect."
The NASA group was looking at one of the ways supernova might wipe out
life on Earth. After a supernova occurred, high energy radiation would
hit our atmosphere, catalysing and breaking down ozone. "It
essentially would de-stabilise our own biosphere, to the point [where]
it would have a significant impact," Tinney told ABC Science Online.
Since the original calculations were made in the 1970s, astronomers
have learnt a lot more about supernovae, said Tinney. Astronomers have
since debated how much radiation supernovae produce, how the rays
damage the atmosphere and how often stars explode nearby.
The NASA researchers used the energy from Supernova 1987A to make
their new calculations. The supernova was the first ever detected
since modern telescopes were invented, and appeared in the sky in
early 1987.
They found that to thin the ozone layer enough to allow twice as much
ultraviolet light to reach the surface, a star would need to explode
within 25 light years of Earth.
"Twenty-five light years is very close," said Tinney. "We know all the
stars within 25 light years, and we know that none are massive enough
to go off [in a supernova]. So the number of possible supernovae that
can do this has been reduced to none."
Only a particular type of star one that is near the end of its life
and above a certain mass can go supernova. "You are in more danger
of being hit by a bus," said Tinney.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2701977.stm
Odds against Earth-like planets
Scientists hope that habitable planets can be found
By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor
Earth-like worlds circling stars in orbital zones suitable for life
may be few and far between in the cosmos, according to new research.
In the first comprehensive study of extrasolar planetary systems,
astronomers have shown that in most of them it would not be possible
to keep an Earth-like world in orbit around a star so that it was
neither too hot nor too cold for life.
In general, other planetary systems fall into two types: those with
Jupiter-like worlds circling close to their parent star, and those
with more distant Jupiters in elliptical orbits.
In both systems, maintaining an Earth-like world in a temperate orbit
is difficult, although not in all cases impossible.
"This work shows us just how unusual our own Solar System is when
compared with the other planetary systems," Dr Kristen Menou of
Princeton University, US, told BBC News Online.
Habitable zone
Eighty-five planetary systems were studied, all that were known when
the research was carried out.
Dr Menou said: "They fall into two categories: large planets circling
very close to their sun - the so-called 'hot Jupiters', and systems
with Jupiter-like planets in distant non-circular orbits."
Dr Menou, along with Dr Serge Tabachnik, created computer dynamical
models of the known exoplanetary systems to see if it was possible for
Earth-like worlds to exist for long periods in the so-called habitable
zone.
This zone is the region around a star in which a planet would be able
to sustain liquid water, being neither too close to the star for it
all to be vaporised, nor too distant that it all freezes.
In our Solar System, the Earth is in the middle of the habitable zone.
Astronomers believe such a position is essential for life to develop
and thrive.
But it seems difficult for worlds to stay in the habitable zone in the
majority of the extrasolar planetary systems found so far.
"We found that in the systems with the distant Jupiters, these worlds
can disrupt the orbit of any Earth-like world in the habitable zone,"
says Dr Menou.
"Any Earth-like world in the temperate zone would either crash on to
its parent star or be slung out into interstellar space," he added.
Over half of the planetary systems studied had distant Jupiters making
them unlikely to contain habitable Earth-like worlds.
"We have identified some systems where distant Jupiters would pull
Earth-like worlds into elliptical orbits that keep them inside the
habitable zone. Such worlds would have dramatic and extreme
seasons. We don't know how that would affect the development of life."
Cast asunder
The new analysis of the systems containing hot Jupiters shows that
Earth-like worlds could remain orbiting in the temperate zone,
seemingly an encouraging finding.
"The good news is that in about a quarter of the systems we studied,
there could be habitable planets present."
But even in these systems, Earth-like worlds may have been cast
asunder.
Current models of the evolution of planetary systems have hot-Jupiters
reaching their tight orbits by migrating inwards from more distant
ones.
This means that as they slowly travelled sunwards, they would have
scattered any smaller worlds that got in their way, suggesting that
there could be no Earth-like worlds in hot Jupiter systems at all.
"The way we are trying to get out of this pessimistic position," says
Dr Menou, "is by seeing if Earth-like worlds could form in a planetary
system after the inward migration of Jupiter worlds."
The research is to be published in a forthcoming edition of the
Astrophysical Journal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2780399.stm:
'Double whammy' created the Moon By Roland Pease BBC Science Cosmic collision (William K Hartmann) Image copyright William K Hartmann The Moon was probably created in a double-whammy impact, 4.5 billion years ago, which virtually destroyed the Earth as it then existed. The theory, by US astrophysicist Dr Robin Canup, is outlined in BBC Radio 4's "An Earth Made for Life" programme. Like the climax in a firework display, the event was the culmination of a 100-million-year process in which the Earth and its neighbouring planets were built through cosmic collisions between sub-planetary objects. This was the biggest blow our planet ever experienced. According to Dr Canup, a proto-planet, something like the size of Mars, collided at high speed with an Earth that was nearly fully formed. The collision was a glancing one. It shattered our Earth, but pulverised the incoming planet. Rain of debris Simulations show the impactor being sprayed out into a shower of orbiting debris. But within a matter of hours, much of this had re-grouped to form a new impactor that smashed into the Earth's surface a second time. "At this point, the impacting object was destroyed," Dr Canup, of the SouthWest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, told the BBC. Most of the impactor rained down onto and became incorporated into the Earth, the last major component to be integrated into our planet. But 10% or so of the mass was spread out into an incandescent disc around the Earth - a scorching equivalent of Saturn's rings. It was out of this material that the Moon was formed in a matter of decades. 'Time zero' "At the time it was 15 times closer than the Moon is now," says Dr Canup. "So if you had been able to stand on the surface of the Earth then, you would have seen something that appeared 15 times the size of what even today is an impressive full Moon." Mike Drake of the Lunar and Planetary Institute calls the impact "time zero" for the Earth. Anything that had happened geologically to the Earth before that would have been erased by the impact. The planet's surface was probably melted down to a depth of 1,000 kilometres, cloaking the Earth in a "magma" ocean that would have radiated like a red-hot furnace. Tiny grains called "calcium-aluminium rich inclusions" have been recovered from comets, which are believed to be the oldest surviving solid pieces of the cloud of dust and gas that once encircled the forming Sun. These have been dated to 4.566 billion years ago (give or take just a couple of million years) and are thought to represent the kind of stuff that the planets formed from. The precise date the Moon was formed is still a matter of debate, but Dr Canup's research implies it was right at the end of the planet-building process, which could have taken up to 100 million years. Curiously, recent chemical research has shown that the planet Earth collided with was a twin to the Earth - scientists have called it "Theia" after the mother of the Moon in Greek mythology. Magma ocean Details in the chemistry of the Moon show it to be almost identical in some key respects to the Earth, although it was made almost entirely from remnants of the impactor. Cosmochemist Alex Halliday says that Theia must have been formed in an orbit almost identical to the Earth's. Time zero for Earth, it seems, was the end of time for its twin. But it wasn't all destruction. As Robin Canup points out, the Moon-forming impact gave the Earth its spin on its axis that now gives us 24-hour days, and stirs up the atmosphere so that no part of the Earth is too hot or too cold for life. And the presence of the Moon gives the Earth a kind of gravitational counterbalance that stabilises its slightly inclined axis of rotation - 23 degrees to its orbit - that gives us the congenial cycle of the seasons over a single orbit around the Sun. And the scalding magma ocean, according to Mike Drake, was (surprisingly) the place where the water of the Earth's oceans would have been held - giving our planet one of its key ingredients for life.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3181546.stm Life's lucky 'kick start' By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor The Cambrian Explosion - when life suddenly and rapidly flourished some 550 million years ago - may have an explanation in the reaction of primitive life to some big event. Something triggered the explosion of life The explosion is one of the most significant yet least understood periods in the history of life on Earth. New research suggests it may have occurred because of a complex interaction between components of the biosphere after they had been disturbed by, for example, the break-up of a super-continent or an asteroid impact. Scientists say the life explosion might just have easily occurred two billion years earlier - or not at all. Dramatic events All modern forms of life have their origin in the sudden diversification of organisms that occurred at the end of the so-called Cryptozoic Eon. Scientists have struggled to explain what might have happened in the previous few hundred million years to trigger such a burst of life. BIOLOGY'S 'BIG BANG' Major animal groups, or phyla, trace lineage to Cambrian Period Age of trilobites, sea-dwelling arthropods used to date rock layers Medieval Latin name for Wales, where Cambrian rocks first described Certainly, it was a period of history that witnessed the assembly and break-up of two super continents and at least two major glaciation events. Atmospheric oxygen levels were also on the rise. But what actually caused the Cambrian Explosion is unknown. Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Dr Werner von Bloh and colleagues, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, present a new analysis of happened. They suggest that "feedback" in the biosphere caused it to jump from one stable state without complex life to one that allowed complicated life to proliferate. "We believe that there was a change in the environment - a slow cooling of the system - that caused positive feedback that allowed the conditions for complex life," Dr von Bloh told BBC News Online. Self regulation Using a computer model of the ancient Earth, the researchers considered three components of the biosphere, the zone of life. These were single-celled life with and without a nucleus, and multicellular life. Each of these three groups have different environmental tolerances outside which they cannot thrive. Simulating the primitive Earth's biosphere The computer model showed there were two zones of stability for the Earth - with or without higher lifeforms - and that 542 million years ago the planet flipped from one to the other. What caused the flip is not clear. It might have been a continental break-up, or even an asteroid impact. There is some indication that the Moon suffered a sudden increase in impacts about the same time as the Cambrian Explosion. If so, then the Earth would have been affected as well. This latest analysis also provides some support for the Gaia hypothesis - the idea that the biosphere somehow acts as a self-sustaining and regulating whole that opposes any changes that would destroy life on Earth. Intelligent beings Dr von Blow says that after the Cambrian Explosion there has been a stabilisation of temperature up to the present, and that the biosphere is not playing a passive role. He also adds that there is an intriguing implication from his research which suggests that had the conditions been only slightly different, the Cambrian Explosion could have occurred two billion years earlier. An early explosion would have meant that by now the Earth could have developed far more advanced intelligent creatures than humans. Alternatively it could still be inhabited by nothing more complex than bacteria. Dr von Bloh says that it will be of great interest when we find other Earth-like worlds circling other stars to see if they have had their own Cambrian explosions yet. The timing of such events has implications for the search for intelligent life in space, he says.
This one is totally new to me! If they are right, it may cut
down the probability of technolife by yet another order of magnitude
per solar system.
About the only thing that is clear so far from detections of
extrasolar planets is that the big gas giants can be found all over
the map, including virtually skimming the surface of the primary, so
location of the gas giants is clearly a critically important real
variability, not just a theoretically possible one.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/08/040825095109.htm
Meteorites Supplied Earth Life With Phosphorus,
Scientists Say
University of Arizona scientists have discovered that meteorites,
particularly iron meteorites, may have been critical to the evolution
of life on Earth.
Their research shows that meteorites easily could have provided more
phosphorus than naturally occurs on Earth -- enough phosphorus to give
rise to biomolecules which eventually assembled into living,
replicating organisms.
Phosphorus is central to life. It forms the backbone of DNA and RNA
because it connects these molecules' genetic bases into long
chains. It is vital to metabolism because it is linked with life's
fundamental fuel, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy that powers
growth and movement. And phosphorus is part of living architecture ?
it is in the phospholipids that make up cell walls and in the bones of
vertebrates.
"In terms of mass, phosphorus is the fifth most important biologic
element, after carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen," said Matthew
A. Pasek, a doctoral candidate in UA's planetary sciences department
and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
But where terrestrial life got its phosphorus has been a mystery, he
added.
Phosphorus is much rarer in nature than are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon,
and nitrogen.
Pasek cites recent studies that show there's approximately one
phosphorus atom for every 2.8 million hydrogen atoms in the cosmos,
every 49 million hydrogen atoms in the oceans, and every 203 hydrogen
atoms in bacteria. Similarly, there's a single phosphorus atom for
every 1,400 oxygen atoms in the cosmos, every 25 million oxygen atoms
in the oceans, and 72 oxygen atoms in bacteria. The numbers for carbon
atoms and nitrogen atoms, respectively, per single phosphorus atom are
680 and 230 in the cosmos, 974 and 633 in the oceans, and 116 and 15
in bacteria.
"Because phosphorus is much rarer in the environment than in life,
understanding the behavior of phosphorus on the early Earth gives
clues to life's orgin," Pasek said.
The most common terrestrial form of the element is a mineral called
apatite. When mixed with water, apatite releases only very small
amounts of phosphate. Scientists have tried heating apatite to high
temperatures, combining it with various strange, super-energetic
compounds, even experimenting with phosphorous compounds unknown on
Earth. This research hasn't explained where life's phosphorus comes
from, Pasek noted.
Pasek began working with Dante Lauretta, UA assistant professor of
planetary sciences, on the idea that meteorites are the source of
living Earth's phosphorus. The work was inspired by Lauretta's earlier
experiments that showed that phosphorus became concentrated at metal
surfaces that corroded in the early solar system.
"This natural mechanism of phosphorus concentration in the presence of
a known organic catalyst (such as iron-based metal) made me think that
aqueous corrosion of meteoritic minerals could lead to the formation
of important phosphorus-bearing biomolecules," Lauretta said.
"Meteorites have several different minerals that contain phosphorus,"
Pasek said. "The most important one, which we've worked with most
recently, is iron-nickel phosphide, known as schreibersite."
Schreibersite is a metallic compound that is extremely rare on
Earth. But it is ubiquitous in meteorites, especially iron meteorites,
which are peppered with schreibersite grains or slivered with
pinkish-colored schreibersite veins.
Last April, Pasek, UA undergraduate Virginia Smith, and Lauretta mixed
schriebersite with room-temperature, fresh, de-ionized water. They
then analyzed the liquid mixture using NMR, nuclear magnetic
resonance.
"We saw a whole slew of different phosphorus compounds being formed,"
Pasek said. "One of the most interesting ones we found was P2-O7 (two
phorphorus atoms with seven oxygen atoms), one of the more
biochemically useful forms of phosphate, similar to what's found in
ATP."
Previous experiments have formed P2-07, but at high temperature or
under other extreme conditions, not by simply dissolving a mineral in
room-temperature water, Pasek said.
"This allows us to somewhat constrain where the origins of life may
have occurred," he said. "If you are going to have phosphate-based
life, it likely would have had to occur near a freshwater region where
a meteorite had recently fallen. We can go so far, maybe, as to say it
was an iron meteorite. Iron meteorites have from about 10 to 100 times
as much schreibersite as do other meteorites.
"I think meteorites were critical for the evolution of life because of
some of the minerals, especially the P2-07 compound, which is used in
ATP, in photosynthesis, in forming new phosphate bonds with organics
(carbon-containing compounds), and in a variety of other biochemical
processes," Pasek said.
"I think one of the most exciting aspects of this discovery is the
fact that iron meteorites form by the process of planetesimal
differentiation," Lauretta said. That is, the building-blocks of
planets, called planestesmals, form both a metallic core and a
silicate mantle. Iron meteorites represent the metallic core, and
other types of meteorites, called achondrites, represent the mantle.
"No one ever realized that such a critical stage in planetary
evolution could be coupled to the origin of life," he added. "This
result constrains where, in our solar system and others, life could
originate. It requires an asteroid belt where planetesimals can grow
to a critical size ? around 500 kilometers in diameter ? and a
mechanism to disrupt these bodies and deliver them to the inner solar
system."
Jupiter drives the delivery of planetesimals to our inner solar
system, Lauretta said, thereby limiting the chances that outer solar
system planets and moons will be supplied with the reactive forms of
phosphorus used by biomolecules essential to terrestrial life.
Solar systems that lack a Jupiter-sized object that can perturb
mineral-rich asteroids inward toward terrestrial planets also have dim
prospects for developing life, Lauretta added.
Pasek is talking about the research today (Aug. 24) at the 228th
American Chemical Society national meeting in Philadelphia. The work
is funded by the NASA program, Astrobiology: Exobiology and
Evolutionary Biology.
Not a Brick yet, but bears watching:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1379419,00.html
Deep Sea Sediment Might Have Sparked Evolution
A stellar explosion, like this one, could have changed earth's climate
German scientists, sifting through dust on the ocean's floor, have
discovered stardust that may have helped initiate human evolution.
The team of researchers, from the Technical University of Munich,
announced on Wednesday that sediment found at the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean could be from a star explosion 2.8 million years ago
that may have coincided with massive climate change in the world.
About 15,750 feet (4,800 meters) below the surface of the Pacific
Ocean, the scientists found layers of iron-60. The version of iron is
very unusual in that it takes a lot of heat and pressure to make it,
the kind of heat and pressure only a supernova can deliver.
The researchers theorized that a star explosion close to earth was the
only explanation for the sediment's location on the bottom of the
ocean. They said the layer indicated the star exploded 2.8 million
years ago, showering down iron and cosmic rays.
Working on previous evidence that cosmic ray bombardment could have
opened up the ozone layer, the researchers said the supernova could
have cooked up the earth in such a way as to force climate change.
Anthropologists believe that climate change led to deforestation,
forcing hominids to climb down from the trees and walk erect.
"The African climate shifted towards more arid conditions about 2.8
million years ago," the researchers, led by Gunther Korschinek,
wrote. "Some of the major events in early hominid evolution appear to
be coeval with African climate changes."
The discovery comes five years after Korschinek led the team that
first discovered iron-60 sediment in a more shallow area of the
Pacific Ocean. Scientists said at the time that the sediment was
deposited on Earth at the same time as the planet was undergoing
"mini-extinctions," where species die out at a higher rate than
normal.
In a paper published in the New Astronomy Journal, Brian Fields and
John Ellis wrote that the team's discovery would "constitute the first
direct evidence that a supernova occurred near Earth in the fairly
recent geologic past, with detectable effects on our planet."
This week's discovery appears to bolster the claim.
Datum:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991029071656.htm
Oxygen May Be Cause Of First Snowball Earth
Denver, Colo. -- Increasing amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere could
have triggered the first of three past episodes when the Earth became
a giant snowball, covered from pole to pole by ice and frozen oceans,
according to a Penn State researcher.
Earth & Climate
"We have convincing evidence that at least six of the seven continents
were once glaciated, and we also have evidence that some of these
continents were near the equator when they were covered with ice,"
says Dr. James F. Kasting, professor of geosciences and
meteorology. "Two of these global glaciations occurred at 600 and 750
million years ago, but the earliest occurred at 2.3 billion years
ago."
According to Kasting, if it is assumed that the magnetic evidence for
glaciation at the equator is correct, then only two possible
explanations for equatorial glaciation exist.
One is that the Earth's tilt, which is now at 23.5 degrees from
vertical, was higher than about 54 degrees from vertical. This would
have positioned Earth so that the poles received the most solar energy
and the equator would receive the least, creating a glacier around the
middle but still leaving the poles unfrozen.
The other possibility, which is the one that Kasting leans toward now,
is that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere fell low enough so that
over millions of years, glaciers gradually encroached from the poles
to 30 degrees from the equator. Then, in about 1,000 years, the
remainder of the Earth rapidly froze due to the great reflectivity of
the already ice-covered areas and their inability to capture heat from
the sun. The entire Earth became a snowball with oceans frozen to more
than a half mile deep.
"For the latest two glaciations, carbon dioxide levels fell low enough
to begin the glaciation process. However, for the earliest glaciation,
the key may have been methane," Kasting told attendees at the annual
meeting of the Geological Society of America today (Oct. 27) in
Denver. "The earliest known snowball Earth occurred around the time
that oxygen levels in the atmosphere began to rise," says Kasting, who
is a member of the Penn State Astrobiology Center. "Before then,
methane was a major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in addition to
carbon dioxide and water vapor."
As oxygen levels increased, methane levels decreased dramatically and
carbon dioxide levels had not built up enough to compensate, allowing
the Earth to cool. Oxygen levels need only reach a hundredth of a
percent of present-day oxygen levels to convert the methane atmosphere
completely. Once the Earth is snow covered, it takes 5 to 10 million
years for the natural activity of volcanos to increase carbon dioxide
enough to melt the glaciers.
Regardless of the greenhouse gas involved, the pattern of freezing and
defrosting would be the same. Because the sun has been constantly
increasing in brightness, it would take more greenhouse gas in the
past to compensate for the fainter sun. For the glaciations at 600 and
750 million years ago, estimates are that carbon dioxide levels equal
to recent pre-industrial levels or up to three times pre-industrial
levels would have been sufficient for snowball Earth to occur.
Because many continents existed in the warm equatorial areas during
the most recent glaciations, Kasting believes that rapid weathering of
calcium and magnesium silicate rocks, which consumes carbon dioxide,
lowered levels sufficient to cool things.
"It would have taken nearly 300 times present levels of carbon dioxide
to bring the Earth out of its ice cover," says Kasting. "Then, once
the high reflectivity ice was gone, the carbon dioxide would have
overcompensated and the Earth would become very warm until rapid
weathering would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."
One reason that many scientists initially rejected the snowball Earth
theory was that biological evidence does not suggest that the various
forms of life on Earth branched out from the latest total
glaciation. A variety of life forms had to survive from before the
glaciation, which is difficult to imagine on an ice-covered
world. Perhaps the ancestors of life today survived in refuges like
hot springs or near undersea thermal vents.
"The biological puzzle of snowball Earth is very interesting," says
Kasting. "Events suggest that life was more robust than we thought and
that the Earth's climate was much less stable than we assumed."
Datum:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000529093616.htm
Equatorial Water May Have Provided Means Of Survival
Sudden warming trends melted ice, providing refuge for multi-celled
animals while the rest of the Earth was frozen
The precursor of modern animals may have been able to survive a
Snowball Earth era that occurred some 600 million years ago because of
a belt of open water along the equator, suggests scientists from the
University of Toronto and Texas A&M University. This was a time
considered critical in the evolutionary development of multi-celled
animals and therefore the most important interval for biological
evolution in general.
In a paper to be published in the May 25 edition of Nature, University
of Toronto physics professor Richard Peltier and Texas A&M
oceanographers William Hyde, Thomas Crowley and Steven Baum note that
the late Proterozoic era (600-800 million years ago) was the most
important period of evolution for multi-cellular creatures. However,
this period was also a time in Earth's history that has come to be
referred to as the Snowball Earth. At that time, the planet was
thought to be completely ice-covered. Geological and paleomagnetic
evidence indicates that for alternating periods, the Earth was
completely covered by ice sheets over the continents and sea ice over
the oceans, followed by sudden warming trends that melted the ice.
"If the suface of the planet was covered by ice, the question arises
as to how early life managed to survive under such environmental
stress," says Peltier. To find an answer, the scientists employed
several different models of the climate systems and ran detailed
computer simulations of the climate thought to have been
characteristic of that time. To simulate the Snowball Earth, they
reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth -- to account for
the fact that the sun was about six per cent less luminous than it is
now -- and varied the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide
within the range expected for that time.
In most of the simulations, their analysis revealed the presence of a
belt of open water near the equator when the general circulation of
the ocean was taken into account. "It is this open water that may have
provided a refuge for multi-celled animals when the rest of the Earth
was covered by ice and snow," Peltier explains.
The findings of this research are critical to understanding how early
life evolved, he states. "This could help clarify how multi-celled
animals managed not only stay alive, but to thrive given the Earth's
harsh conditions. The extreme climates may even have exerted pressure
on these animals to evolve and adapt, possibly leading to the rapid
development of new forms of animals and their movement into new,
unpopulated habitats when the Earth exited the snowball state. It was
during the warm Cambrian era -- immediately following the late
Proterozoic -- in which life proliferated."
The late Proterozoic period was also a time when the supercontinents
Rodinia and Pannotia formed and subsequently rifted and
disassembled. Located over the south rotational pole in the position
of present-day Antarctica, these supercontinents were made up of the
current land masses of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia,
Greenland, Laurentia and parts of Asia. According to Peltier, the
entry of the Earth into the snowball state required not only the weak
sun and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels not significantly higher
than present-day, but also this high degree of polar continentality.
Datum:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031031063656.htm
Scientists Find Evolution Of Life Helped Keep Earth Habitable
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- A trio of scientists including a researcher from
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that humans may
owe the relatively mild climate in which their ancestors evolved to
tiny marine organisms with shells and skeletons made out of calcium
carbonate.
In a paper titled "Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and
Neoproterozoic Ice Ages" in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC
Riverside researchers Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL
climate scientist Ken Caldeira, discovered that the increased
stability in modern climate may be due in part to the evolution of
marine plankton living in the open ocean with shells and skeletal
material made out of calcium carbonate. They conclude that these
marine organisms helped prevent the ice ages of the past few hundred
thousand years from turning into a severe global deep freeze.
"The most recent ice ages were mild enough to allow and possibly even
promote the evolution of modern humans," Caldeira said. "Without these
tiny marine organisms, the ice sheets may have grown to cover the
earth, like in the snowball glaciations of the ancient past, and our
ancestors might not have survived."
The researchers used a computer model describing the ocean, atmosphere
and land surface to look at how atmospheric carbon dioxide would
change as a result of glacier growth. They found that, in the distant
past, as glaciers started to grow, the oceans would suck the
greenhouse gas -- carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- making the
Earth colder, promoting an even deeper ice age. When marine plankton
with carbonate shells and skeletons are added to the model, ocean
chemistry is buffered and glacial growth does not cause the ocean to
absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But in Precambrian times (which lasted up until 544 million years
ago), marine organisms in the open ocean did not produce carbonate
skeletons -- and ancient rocks from the end of the Precambrian
geological age indicate that huge glaciers deposited layers of crushed
rock debris thousands of meters thick near the equator. If the land
was frozen near the equator, then most of the surface of the planet
was likely covered in ice, making Earth look like a giant snowball,
the researchers said.
Around 200 million years ago, calcium carbonate organisms became
critical to helping prevent the earth from freezing over. When the
organisms die, their carbonate shells and skeletons settle to the
ocean floor, where some dissolve and some are buried in
sediments. These deposits help regulate the chemistry of the ocean and
the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, in a related
study published in Nature on Sept. 25, 2003, Caldeira and LLNL
physicist Michael Wickett found that unrestrained release of
fossil-fuel carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could threaten extinction
for these climate-stabilizing marine organisms.
Datum: Despite long-term 30% increase in solar brightness, the biosphere seems exquisitely sensistive to fluctuations in the solar "constant": http://www.news-about-space.org/story/2409.html Major Climate Change Occurred 5,200 Years Ago: Evidence Suggests That History Could Repeat Itself December 16, 2004 Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson worries that he may have found clues that show history repeating itself, and if he is right, the result could have important implications to modern society. Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe. From the mountains of data drawn by analyzing countless ice cores, and a meticulous review of sometimes obscure historic records, Thompson and his research team at Ohio State University are convinced that the global climate has changed dramatically. But more importantly, they believe it has happened at least once before, and the results were nearly catastrophic to emerging cultures at the time. He outlined his interpretations and fears today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. A professor of geological sciences at Ohio State and a researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center, Thompson points to markers in numerous records suggesting that the climate was altered suddenly some 5,200 years ago with severe impacts. He points to perfectly preserved plants he discovered that recently emerged from the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes as that glacier retreats. This monstrous glacier, some 551 feet (168 meters) deep, has shown an exponentially increasing rate of retreat since his first observations in 1963. The plants were carbon-dated to determine their age and tests indicated they had been buried by the ice for perhaps 5,200 years. That suggests that somehow, the climate had shifted suddenly and severely to capture the plants and preserve them until now. In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated. Later tests showed that the human " dubbed Oetzi " became trapped and died around 5,200 years ago. Thompson points to a study of tree rings from Ireland and England that span a period of 7,000 years. The point in that record when the tree rings were narrowest " suggesting the driest period experienced by the trees " was approximately 5,200 years ago. He points to ice core records showing the ratio of two oxygen isotopes retrieved from the ice fields atop Africa"s Mount Kilimanjaro. A proxy for atmospheric temperature at the time snow fell, the records are at their lowest 5,200 years before now. He lists the shift by the Sahara Desert from a habitable region to a barren desert; major changes in plant pollen uncovered from lakebed cores in South America, and the record lowest levels of methane retrieved from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and all occurred at the same time " 5,200 years ago. "Something happened back at this time and it was monumental," Thompson said. "But it didn"t seem monumental to humans then because there were only approximately 250 million people occupying the planet, compared to the 6.4 billion we now have. "The evidence clearly points back to this point in history and to some event that occurred. It also points to similar changes occurring in today"s climate as well," he said. "To me, these are things we really need to be concerned about." The impact of a climate change of that magnitude on a modern world would be tremendous, he said. Seventy percent of the population lives in the world"s tropics and major climate changes would directly impact most of them. Thompson believes that the 5,200-year old event may have been caused by a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the earth. Scientists know that a historic global cooling called the Little Ice Age, from 1450 to 1850 A.D., coincided with two periods of decreased solar activity. Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate change he sees in all those records. "The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability," he said. "It"s likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence. "Any prudent person would agree that we don"t yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we "tweak" the system," he said. "The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/comet_bronzeage_011113-1.html Comets, Meteors & Myth By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 13 November 2001 "...and the seven judges of hell ... raised their torches, lighting the land with their livid flame. A stupor of despair went up to heaven when the god of the storm turned daylight into darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup." -- An account of the Deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2200 B.C. If you are fortunate enough to see the storm of shooting stars predicted for the Nov. 18 peak of the Leonid meteor shower, you'll be watching a similar but considerably less powerful version of events which some scientists say brought down the world's first civilizations. The root of both: debris from a disintegrating comet. Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 B.C., when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa. SCIENCE TUESDAY Visit SPACE.com to explore a new science feature each Tuesday. >>Go to Science Tuesday archive page Images A 1994 image of Comet Borrelly on one of its swings around the Sun. Norwegian astrophotographer Arne Danielsen captured this spectacular Leonid fireball on November 18, 1999. Related SPACE.com STORIES Leonids 2002 Special Report The Origin of Sex: Cosmic Solution to Ancient Mystery Reinventing Darwin Again: How Asteroids Impacted Human Evolution Engineering ET: The Path to Alternate Life Forms Survival of the Elitist: Bioterrorism May Spur Space Colonies TODAY'S DISCUSSION What do you think of this story? >>Uplink your views Increasingly, some scientists suspect comets and their associated meteor storms were the cause. History and culture provide clues: Icons and myths surrounding the alleged cataclysms persist in cults and religions today and even fuel terrorism. And a newly found 2-mile-wide crater in Iraq, spotted serendipitously in a perusal of satellite images, could provide a smoking gun. The crater's discovery, which was announced in a recent issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, is a preliminary finding. Scientists stress that a ground expedition is needed to determine if the landform was actually carved out by an impact. Yet the crater has already added another chapter to an intriguing overall story that is, at best, loosely bound. Many of the pages are washed away or buried. But several plot lines converge in conspicuous ways. Too many coincidences Archeological findings show that in the space of a few centuries, many of the first sophisticated civilizations disappeared. The Old Kingdom in Egypt fell into ruin. The Akkadian culture of Iraq, thought to be the world's first empire, collapsed. The settlements of ancient Israel, gone. Mesopotamia, Earth's original breadbasket, dust. Around the same time -- a period called the Early Bronze Age -- apocalyptic writings appeared, fueling religious beliefs that persist today. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the fire, brimstone and flood of possibly mythical events. Omens predicting the Akkadian collapse preserve a record that "many stars were falling from the sky." The "Curse of Akkad," dated to about 2200 B.C., speaks of "flaming potsherds raining from the sky." Roughly 2000 years later, the Jewish astronomer Rabbi bar Nachmani created what could be considered the first impact theory: That Noah's Flood was triggered by two "stars" that fell from the sky. "When God decided to bring about the Flood, He took two stars from Khima, threw them on Earth, and brought about the Flood." Another thread was woven into the tale when, in 1650, the Irish Archbishop James Ussher mapped out the chronology of the Bible -- a feat that included stringing together all the "begats" to count generations -- and put Noah's great flood at 2349 B.C. All coincidence? A number of scientists don't think so. Mounting hard evidence collected from tree rings, soil layers and even dust that long ago settled to the ocean floor indicates there were widespread environmental nightmares in the Near East during the Early Bronze Age: Abrupt cooling of the climate, sudden floods and surges from the seas, huge earthquakes. Comet as a culprit In recent years, the fall of ancient civilizations has come to be viewed not as a failure of social engineering or political might but rather the product of climate change and, possibly, heavenly happenstance. As this new thinking dawned, volcanoes and earthquakes were blamed at first. More recently, a 300-year drought has been the likely suspect. But now more than ever, it appears a comet could be the culprit. One or more devastating impacts could have rocked the planet, chilled the air, and created unthinkable tsunamis -- ocean waves hundreds of feet high. Showers of debris wafting through space -- concentrated versions of the dust trails that create the Leonids -- would have blocked the Sun and delivered horrific rains of fire to Earth for years. So far, the comet theory lacks firm evidence. Like a crater. Now, though, there is this depression in Iraq. It was found accidentally by Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, while studying satellite images. Master says the crater bears the signature shape and look of an impact caused by a space rock. The finding has not been developed into a full-fledged scientific paper, however, nor has it undergone peer review. Scientist in several fields were excited by the possibility, but they expressed caution about interpreting the preliminary analysis and said a full scientific expedition to the site needs to be mounted to determine if the landforms do in fact represent an impact crater. Researchers would look for shards of melted sand and telltale quartz that had been shocked into existence. If it were a comet, the impact would have occurred on what was once a shallow sea, triggering massive flooding following the fire generated by the object's partial vaporization as it screamed through the atmosphere. The comet would have plunged through the water and dug into the earth below. If it proves to be an impact crater, there is a good chance it was dug from the planet less than 6,000 years ago, Master said, because shifting sediment in the region would have buried anything older. Arriving at an exact date will be difficult, researchers said. "It's an exciting crater if it really is of impact origin," said Bill Napier, an astronomer at the Armagh Observatory. Cultural impact Napier said an impact that could carve a hole this large would have packed the energy of several dozen nuclear bombs. The local effect: utter devastation. "But the cultural effect would be far greater," Napier said in an e-mail interview. "The event would surely be incorporated into the world view of people in the Near East at that time and be handed down through the generations in the form of celestial myths." Napier and others have also suggested that the swastika, a symbol with roots in Asia stretching back to at least 1400 B.C., could be an artist's rendering of a comet, with jets spewing material outward as the head of the comet points earthward. But could a single impact of this size take down civilizations on three continents? No way, most experts say. Napier thinks multiple impacts, and possibly a rain of other smaller meteors and dust, would have been required. He and his colleagues have been arguing since 1982 that such events are possible. And, he says, it might have happened right around the time the first urban civilizations were crumbling. Napier thinks a comet called Encke, discovered in 1786, is the remnant of a larger comet that broke apart 5,000 years ago. Large chunks and vast clouds of smaller debris were cast into space. Napier said it's possible that Earth ran through that material during the Early Bronze Age. The night sky would have been lit up for years by a fireworks-like display of comet fragments and dust vaporizing upon impact with Earth's atmosphere. The Sun would have struggled to shine through the debris. Napier has tied the possible event to a cooling of the climate, measured in tree rings, that ran from 2354-2345 B.C. Supporting evidence Though no other craters have been found in the region and precisely dated to this time, there is other evidence to suggest the scenario is plausible. Two large impact craters in Argentina are believed to have been created sometime in the past 5,000 years. Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said roughly a dozen craters are known to have been carved out during the past 10,000 years. Dating them precisely is nearly impossible with current technology. And, Peiser said, whether any of the impact craters thought to have been made in the past 10,000 years can be tied back to a single comet is still unknown. But he did not discount Napier's scenario. "There is no scientific reason to doubt that the break-up of a giant comet might result in a shower of cosmic debris," Peiser said. He also points out that because Earth is covered mostly by deep seas, each visible crater represents more ominous statistical possibilities. "For every crater discovered on land, we should expect two oceanic impacts with even worse consequences," he said. Tsunamis generated in deep water can rise even taller when they reach a shore. Next Page: Terrorism of today rooted in ancient impacts Reverberating today Peiser studies known craters for clues to the past. But he also examines religions and cults, old and new, for signs of what might have happened way back then. "I would not be surprised if the notorious rituals of human sacrifice were a direct consequence of attempts to overcome this trauma," he says of the South American impact craters. "Interestingly, the same deadly cults were also established in the Near East during the Bronze Age." The impact of comets on myth and religion has reverberated through the ages, in Peiser's view. "One has to take into consideration apocalyptic religions [of today] to understand the far-reaching consequences of historical impacts," he says. "After all, the apocalyptic fear of the end of the world is still very prevalent today and can often lead to fanaticism and extremism." An obsession with the end of the world provides the legs on which modern-day terrorism stands, Peiser argues. Leaders of fundamentalist terror groups drum into the minds of their followers looming cataclysms inspired by ancient writings. Phrases run along these lines: a rolling up of the sun, darkening of the stars, movement of the mountains, splitting of the sky. SCIENCE TUESDAY Visit SPACE.com to explore a new science feature each Tuesday. >>Go to Science Tuesday archive page Images A 1994 image of Comet Borrelly on one of its swings around the Sun. Norwegian astrophotographer Arne Danielsen captured this spectacular Leonid fireball on November 18, 1999. Related SPACE.com STORIES Leonids 2002 Special Report The Origin of Sex: Cosmic Solution to Ancient Mystery Reinventing Darwin Again: How Asteroids Impacted Human Evolution Engineering ET: The Path to Alternate Life Forms Survival of the Elitist: Bioterrorism May Spur Space Colonies TODAY'S DISCUSSION What do you think of this story? >>Uplink your views It is in the context of such apocalyptic religions that a large meteorite, enshrined in the Kaba in Mecca, became the most feared and venerated object of the Islamic faith, Peiser said. By using such language, radical fundamentalist leaders instill "absolute commitment and fanaticism into their followers," Peiser said. "Once you believe that the end is imminent and that your direct action will hasten the coming of end-times, every atrocity is sanctioned." No smoking gun yet Despite the excitement of the newfound hole in the ground in Iraq, it is still far from clear why so many civilizations collapsed in such a relatively short historical time frame. Few scientists, even those who find evidence to support the idea, are ready to categorically blame a comet. French soil scientist Marie-Agnes Courty, who in 1997 found material that could only have come from a meteorite and dated it to the Early Bronze Age, urged caution on drawing any conclusions until a smoking gun has been positively identified. "Certain scientists and the popular press do prefer the idea of linking natural catastrophes and societal collapse," Courty said. Multiple cosmic impacts are an attractive culprit though, because of the many effects they can have, including some found in real climate and geologic data. The initial impact, if it is on land, vaporizes life for miles around. Earthquakes devastate an even wider area. A cloud of debris can block out the Sun and alter the climate. The extent and duration of the climate effects is not known for sure, because scientists have never witnessed such an event. It might not have taken much. Ancient civilizations, which depended on farming and reliable rainfall, were precarious. Mike Baillie, a professor of palaeoecology at Queens University in Belfast, figures it would have taken just a few bad years to destroy such a society. Even a single comet impact large enough to have created the Iraqi crater, "would have caused a mini nuclear winter with failed harvests and famine, bringing down any agriculture based populations which can survive only as long as their stored food reserves," Baillie said. "So any environmental downturn lasting longer than about three years tends to bring down civilizations." Other scientists doubt that a single impact would have altered the climate for so long. Lessons for tomorrow Either way, there is a giant scar on the planet, near the cradle of civilization, that could soon begin to provide some solid answers, assuming geologists can get permission to enter Iraq and conduct a study. "If the crater dated from the 3rd Millennium B.C., it would be almost impossible not to connect it directly with the demise of the Early Bronze Age civilizations in the Near East," said Peiser. Perhaps before long all the cometary traditions, myths and scientific fact will be seen to converge at the Iraqi hole in the ground for good purpose. Understanding what happened, and how frequent and deadly such impacts might be, is an important tool for researchers like Peiser who aim to estimate future risk and help modern society avoid the fate of the ancients. "Paradoxically, the Hebrew Bible and other Near Eastern documents have kept alive the memory of ancient catastrophes whose scientific analysis and understanding might now be vital for the protection of our own civilizations from future impacts," Peiser said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4326987.stm Experts weigh super-volcano risks By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter The drama imagines what a super-eruption at Yellowstone would be like Enlarge Image Geologists have called for a taskforce to be set up to consider emergency management in the event of a massive volcanic eruption, or super-eruption. The recommendation comes in a report timed to coincide with a BBC TV drama that depicts a fictional super-eruption at Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, US. Experts say such an event would have a colossal impact on a global scale. A super-eruption is also five to 10 times more likely to happen than an asteroid impact, the report claims. We don't want to be sensationalist about this, but it's going to happen Prof Stephen Self, Open University The authors want to highlight the issue, which they feel is being ignored by governments. They emphasise that while catastrophic eruptions of this kind are rare in terms of a human lifetime, they are surprisingly common on a geological scale. The effects, say the authors, "could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilisation" - putting events such as the Asian tsunami into the shade. The fallout from a super-eruption could cause a "volcanic winter", devastating global agriculture and causing mass starvation. High frequency It would have a similar effect to a 1.5km-diameter space rock striking Earth, they claim. But while impacts of this type are estimated to occur once every 400-500,000 years, the frequency of equivalent super-eruptions is about once every 100,000 years. "These are minimum estimates. Super-eruptions could be even more frequent; we just don't know," said Professor Stephen Self, a geologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes and a member of the working group that produced the report. Mount Pinatubo, USGS The Mount Pinatubo eruption was the biggest recorded in photos "We still have a lot of unassessed regions of the world. The US is the place where we see the largest number of super-eruptions. But that may be because more work has been done there." One past super-eruption struck at Toba in Sumatra 74,000 years ago and is thought by some to have driven the human race to the edge of extinction. Signs from DNA suggest human numbers could have dropped to about 10,000, probably as a result of the effects of climate change. The TV drama, called Supervolcano, sticks closely to scientific understanding of these events. The plot revolves around a series of violent eruptions at Yellowstone in Wyoming that send thousands of cubic metres of rock, gas and ash spiralling up in cloud that rains down over three-quarters of the United States. Contingency plans Highways become blocked with cars as millions flee the unfolding disaster, and as the chain of eruptions unzips Yellowstone's volcanic crater, hundreds of thousands are killed as the ash swamps whole towns and cities. Yellowstone geyser, USGS Yellowstone is the largest volcanic system in North America America's food-producing regions are devastated, communications are knocked out and planes are forced out of the sky. Sulphuric acid droplets form in the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight, and causing global temperatures to plummet. Professor Stephen Sparks, of Bristol University, an author on the new report, said civil contingency plans would need to be similar to those for a nuclear war. "You would need contingencies for food and shelter. But you would need to put a serious amount of resources into any effort to cope with an event on this scale, so it poses a dilemma," he said. The volcanic winter resulting from a super-eruption could last several years or decades, depending on the scale of an eruption, and according to recent computer models, could cause cooling on a global scale of 5-10C. Damage limitation Ailsa Orr, producer of Supervolcano, said that when the programme team presented the scenario to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the agency admitted it had given little thought to such an event happening on American soil. "We don't want to be sensationalist about this, but it's going to happen. We just can't say exactly when," said Professor Self. "But we have just had a natural disaster affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Now is the time to be thinking about this." Yellowstone is the largest volcanic system in North America. The area's cauldrons of bubbling mud and roaring geysers attract nearly three million visitors each year. It was an obvious choice for the programme makers as the site of their super-eruption because of its location on a highly populated continent and because it has already had three of these events, which have occurred roughly 600,000 years apart from each other. The crater from the last super-eruption, 640,000 years ago, is large enough to fit Tokyo - the world's biggest city - inside it. The report, released by The Geological Society in the UK, identifies at least 31 sites where super-eruptions have occurred in the past. They include Lake Taupo in New Zealand and the Phlegrean Fields near Naples, Italy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1456594,00.html Sea life 'killed by exploding star' Alok Jha, science correspondent Monday April 11, 2005 The Guardian A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago. In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died. Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. Article continues For around 10 seconds, intense pulses of energy are fired off, which can be detected right across the universe. All the bursts recorded by astronomers so far have come from distant galaxies and are therefore harmless to the Earth. But if a burst occurred in our own galaxy, the effect would be devastating. Dr Adrian Melott, of the University of Kansas and an author of the latest paper, said: "A gamma ray burst originating within 6,000 light years from Earth would have a devastating effect on life. "We don't know exactly when one came, but we're rather sure it did come - and left its mark." Such a burst would strip the Earth of its protective ozone layer, allowing deadly ultraviolet radiation to pour down from the sun. Computer models showed that up to half the ozone layer could be destroyed within weeks. Five years later, at least 10% would still be missing. Using computer models, the researchers calculated that plankton and other life in the first few feet of the oceans would have been destroyed. The knock-on effect would have been huge: plankton are at the bottom of the marine food chain providing for animals which are then preyed upon by larger species. Previously, scientists thought that an ice age caused the Ordovican extinction. A gamma ray burst would have had a similar effect, causing a fast die-off early on and triggering a significant drop in surface temperature. Astronomers are planning to launch a robot spacecraft to study the mysterious gamma ray bursts further. Because the bursts happen suddenly and are so short, scientists have been lucky to detect one a month with instruments on Earth. Next month, Nasa will launch the £138m Swift probe, which will sweep up to one sixth of the sky at a time, looking for sudden bursts. If all goes well, the probe could catch two three explosions a week.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4189278.stm Telescope views galaxy collision Image: Gemini Observatory New stars and planets may be forming within the old galaxies (Image: Gemini Observatory) Two galaxies collide in the constellation of Pisces, some 100 million light-years away from Earth. Astronomers say it gives an insight into what may happen to our own region of space some 5 billion years from now. The Milky Way is expected to merge with the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, and swallowing up our Solar System. The image was captured last month by an instrument on the Gemini North Telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Professor Ian Robson, director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, which built the instrument, said that when he first saw the image, it sent shivers down his spine. "Our saving grace is that we have about 5 billion years left before we get swallowed up by Andromeda," he said. "Nevertheless, it's amazing to see so far in advance how planet Earth and our own galaxy will ultimately end. Glad to say I won't be around when the fireball happens." The combined galaxies, known as NGC 520, have lost their shape as a result of the collision. Astronomers believe new stars are forming in the faint red glowing areas seen above and beneath the middle of the image. It is one of many snapshots of distant galaxies and star forming regions taken by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) since it was installed in 2001.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Brick: Hypervariable climate
One brick is the hypervariability of the modern
climate, which is a direct function of the
extraordinarily peculiar modern arrangement of
continents.
Our planet is mostly water, and this is also
a precondition to the rise of life. If surface
water on the planet were limited to lakes, the
climate would be too unstable for technolife
to evolve. Every little cooling episode would
freeze all the surface water on the planet
solid to the bottom of the lakes, wiping out
metazoan life.
If you take a mostly-water planet with
plate tectonics, most of the time what
you get is one supercontinent surrounded
by a huge world ocean.
The world ocean acts as a huge climate-change
damper, and climate on the supercontinent is the
same for tens of millions of years at a stretch:
"This is DINO radio. Weather forecast is
for hot and humid, rainy with daily sunbreaks,
through the end of the geological era, with
massive volcanic outflows and outgassing heading
into the next era. Over to you for sports, Tom."
When the supercontinent -does- break up, it
usually still consists just of a few continents
spotted around the equator and one pole, leaving
the world ocean intact as a climatic damper
system.
But WE live in a totally strange age when the
supercontinent essentially elongated into a
vertical barrier blocking the world ocean
effectively pole-to-pole -- and THEN split
neatly in half lengthwise, producing the
Atlantic ocean, which is essentially a
tuned cavity running north-south pole to
pole, cut off from the rest of the world
ocean for most practical purpose.
"HOW WEIRD IS THAT?!!??" [1]
Nor is this oddity merely an interesting bit
of geographic ornamentation for the continental
drift connoisseur.
On the contrary, from a climate-change point of
view, it is the overwhelmingly dominant
characteristic of the era!
The tuned-pipe ringing of the Atlantic ocean has
the entire planet going from hot to cold and back
again in tens of thousands of years, when it would
usually take tens of millions of years -- which is
to say, a thousand times faster than usual.
For the last couple of million years, during which
humans evolved, the climate organ has been hitting
a crescendo of hypervariability:
HUMANS EVOLVED AT THE PEAK OF THE MOST HYPERVARIABLE
CLIMATE OSCILLATION PATTERN IN THE HISTORY OF THE
PLANET.
Is it coincidence that a "specializing generalist" [2]
species like Homo Sapiens sapiens happened to evolve
during such a peak in climatic variability?
I THINK NOT!
The "jack of all trades is a master of none": In
a time of stable climates, the specializing generalist
is liable to be driven to extinction by
specializing specialists which are better at whatever
matters at the time.
The ability to adapt doesn't cut any
evolutionary ice during eras when the
environment doesn't exercise that ability.
During those sorts of times -- which is
to say, during geologically NORMAL times
-- the ability to adapt is just evolutionary
baggage, like eyes on cave fish living without
light, and like the eyes on those fish, is
going to atrophy in a geological instant:
A thirty-watt brain is a HUGE metabolic
liability in an era when there's no use
for it.
Only in an era when change is too rapid for the
specializing specialists to keep up via
evolutionary adaptation is the specializing
generalist able to compete.
-> Human civilization was able to blossom during the
-> last 10,000 years because when the ice receded,
-> human cultural adaptation allowed them to
-> recolonize the planet faster than species which
-> depended upon evolution to adapt to the newly
-> warm conditions.
In short, humans only discovered the Americas
in the last 10,000 years, but the relationship
goes back for millions of years, because it was
in fact the Americas which CREATED humans.
##################################################
# #
# A necessary precondition for the rise of #
# technolife on a planet is a climate a #
# thousand times more variable than normal, #
# so as to saturate the adaptive capacity #
# of DNA evolution and open a window for the #
# success of culture-based adaptation. #
# #
##################################################
How weird is that?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Brick: Complete absence of
large predators and herbivores
Kids love dinosaurs. In contrast to today's
sedate, normal world, they present us with
this vision of a time in the distant past
when giants and titans struggled for control
of the land.
But, again, from an analytical point of view,
that is exactly backwards.
The dinosaurs didn't live in a time of unusually
big predators and herbivores. The dinosaur era
was in fact quite unremarkable in that respect --
it represented the normal state of affairs.
Rather, -we- live in a peculiar large-animal vacuum.
When the Big Rock hit sixty-five million years
ago,
IT KILLED EVERY LAND ANIMAL ON
THE PLANET LARGER THAN A RAT.
Think about that. Let it sink in. Maybe it
will help to note that the Big Rock also
KNOCKED DOWN EVERY TREE ON THE PLANET. Which
trees then all burned, in the mother of all
forest fires. Imagine news helicopters sending
back video of THAT!
This wasn't life as usual -- this was very nearly
the end of metazoan life as we know it. In a
geological instant, ALL the large-animal
ecological niches were swept clean.
Predators, prey, runners, walkers, flyers --
ALL GONE.
The entire animal world had to evolve back
starting with nothing but rats and lizards.
Know what?
SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS JUST ISN'T
LONG ENOUGH FOR A JOB THAT BIG.
Biologically, we're living in an era where the
biosphere is still recovering from the K/T
boundary catastrophe.
The rats are radiating out to fill the ecologinal
niches swept clean by the K/T Event, but the
process is far from complete.
In fact, it is really just getting properly
started.
What is an elephant?
An elephant is a rat doing its best to be
a brontosaurus.
Even the most cursory comparison of the two
will show how laughably far elephants fall
short of the real thing.
From a cosmic perspective, the entire animal
world today is just a weird giggle -- teeny
tiny rats playing make-believe Big Animal in
ecological niches to which as yet they simply
aren't adapted, amateurs more or less succeeding
in the Big Time because they don't have to
compete with the professionals.
Its as though the TV networks and movies were
run exclusively by kindergartners because two
years ago a plague killed off everyone over
the age of four.
What does this have to do with the rise of
human civilization -- with the appearance
of technolife on this planet?
HUMAN CIVILIZATION COULD ONLY
ARISE IN A LARGE-ANIMAL VACUUM.
Modern humans armed with flint warheads and
wooden missiles were barely able to cope with
runty little mastodons and cave bears.
They wouldn't have had a ghost of a chance
against tyrannosaurs and brontosaurs.
Can you imagine Plains Indians or African
tribes setting up tents by the river in the
dinosaur era? The first T Rex to come along
would think that someone had spread out a
picnic meal for him! End Of Village.
Yet settled life is a prerequisite for the rise of
a civilization -- you can't develop agriculture,
architecture, and metal smelting while hiding in
the treetops and sneaking down at night to
scavenge.
Even ignoring the predator problem: Can you
imagine the first human farmers trying to make a
living from primitive barely-domesticated barley
in an era when entire herds of brontosaurus sized
herbivores could wipe out a year's crop in minutes?
What was the farmer going to do -- post KEEP OUT signs?
Build stone walls thirty feet high and thick?
Even the BIRDS were too big. This week's
news includes a scientific paper concluding
that eagles were in the habit of killing and
eating human children, early in human evolution:
Wounds in child skulls from the era match eagle
beaks and eagle killing tactics.
If teeny little eagles could do that, can you
imagine what toothed flying critters with
forty-foot wingspans would have thought if THEY
caught a band of early humans in the open?
Smorgasbord!!
The simple fact of the matter is that man is
master of his world only because the previous
owners vacated the premises before he arrived.
He didn't subdue the Earth -- he inherited it
from a rich uncle, through sheer dumb luck.
HUMAN CIVILIZATION AROSE DURING A PERIOD OF
LILLIPUTIAN ANIMAL LIFE BECAUSE IT HAD TO --
HUMANS COULDN'T HAVE SURVIVED IN AN ERA
WITH NORMAL SIZED ANIMALS.
#################################################
# #
# A necessary precondition for the rise of #
# technolife is a convenient disaster which #
# kills off ALMOST all animal life on the #
# planet -- but not ALL of it, or there'd #
# be nothing to evolve into humans. #
# #
#################################################
How weird is that?
[1] "Serenity", by Joss Whedon
[2] Robert A Heinlein
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080112151809.htm Earth: A Borderline Planet For Life? ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) ? Our planet is changing before our eyes, and as a result, many species are living on the edge. Yet Earth has been on the edge of habitability from the beginning. New work by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that if Earth had been slightly smaller and less massive, it would not have plate tectonics - the forces that move continents and build mountains. And without plate tectonics, life might never have gained a foothold on our world. "Plate tectonics are essential to life as we know it," said Diana Valencia of Harvard University. "Our calculations show that bigger is better when it comes to the habitability of rocky planets." Plate tectonics involve the movement of huge chunks, or plates, of a planet's surface. Plates spread apart from each other, slide under one another, and even crash into each other, lifting gigantic mountain ranges like the Himalayas. Plate tectonics are powered by magma boiling beneath the surface, much like a bubbling pot of chocolate. The chocolate on top cools and forms a skin or crust, just as magma cools to form the planet's crust. Plate tectonics are crucial to a planet's habitability because they enable complex chemistry and recycle substances like carbon dioxide, which acts as a thermostat and keeps Earth balmy. Carbon dioxide that was locked into rocks is released when those rocks melt, returning to the atmosphere from volcanoes and oceanic ridges. "Recycling is important even on a planetary scale," Valencia explained. Valencia and her colleagues, Richard O'Connell and Dimitar Sasselov (Harvard University), examined the extremes to determine whether plate tectonics would be more or less likely on different-sized rocky worlds. In particular, they studied so-called "super-Earths"-planets more than twice the size of Earth and up to 10 times as massive. (Any larger, and the planet would gather gas as it forms, becoming like Neptune or even Jupiter.) The team found that super-Earths would be more geologically active than our planet, experiencing more vigorous plate tectonics due to thinner plates under more stress. Earth itself was found to be a borderline case, not surprisingly since the slightly smaller planet Venus is tectonically inactive. "It might not be a coincidence that Earth is the largest rocky planet in our solar system, and also the only one with life," said Valencia. Exoplanet searches have turned up five super-Earths already, although none have life-friendly temperatures. If super-Earths are as common as observations suggest, then it is inevitable that some will enjoy Earth-like orbits, making them excellent havens for life. "There are not only more potentially habitable planets, but MANY more," stated Sasselov, who is director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. In fact, a super-Earth could prove to be a popular vacation destination to our far-future descendants. Volcanic "rings of fire" could span the globe while the equivalent of Yellowstone Park would bubble with hot springs and burst with hundreds of geysers. Even better, an Earth-like atmosphere would be possible, while the surface gravity would be up to three times that of Earth on the biggest super-Earths. "If a human were to visit a super-Earth, they might experience a bit more back pain, but it would be worth it to visit such a great tourist spot," Sasselov suggested with a laugh. He added that although a super-Earth would be twice the size of our home planet, it would have similar geography. Rapid plate tectonics would provide less time for mountains and ocean trenches to form before the surface was recycled, yielding mountains no taller and trenches no deeper than those on Earth. Even the weather might be comparable for a world in an Earth-like orbit. "The landscape would be familiar. A super-Earth would feel very much like home," said Sasselov. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe. This research was the subject of a press conference at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
You have to not accidentally go extinct. A population of animals as large as humans on a planet as small as the Earth has a substantial probability of going extinct due to random population fluctuations. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11088535 For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear Natonal Geographic MITOCHONDRIAL DNA is a remarkable thing. Itself the remnant of a strange evolutionary event (the merger of an ancient bacterium with the cell ancestral to all plant and animal life), it also carries the imprint of more recent evolution. In many species, humans included, it passes only from mother to child. No paternal genes get mixed into it. That makes it easy to see when particular genetic mutations happened, and thus to construct a human family tree. The branches of that tree are now well studied. Humans started in Africa, spread to Asia around 60,000 years ago, thence to Australia 50,000 years ago, Europe 35,000 years ago and America 15,000 years ago. What have not been so well examined, though, are the tree's African roots. The genetic diversity of Africans probably exceeds that of the rest of the world put together. But the way that diversity evolved is unclear. A study carried out under the auspices of the Genographic Project, based in Washington, DC, and just published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, goes some way towards correcting this oversight. The study's researchers, led by Doron Behar of the Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa and Spencer Wells of America's National Geographic Society, have used the mitochondrial DNA of more than 600 living Africans to show how genetic diversity has developed in Africa. In doing so, they have shed light on how modern man spread around his home continent long before he took the first, tentative steps into a bigger, wider world. By the drought divided The team paid particular attention to samples taken from the Khoi and San people of southern Africa. These people, known colloquially as bushmen, traditionally make their livings by hunting and gathering. Indeed, their way of life is thought by many anthropologists to resemble quite closely that of pre-agricultural people throughout the world. Comparing Khoi and San DNA with that of other Africans shows that the first big split in Homo sapiens happened shortly after the species emerged, 200,000 years ago. Most people now alive are on one side of that split. Most bushmen are on the other. The consortium's analysis of which DNA ?matrilines? are found where suggests that for much of its history the species was divided into two isolated populations, one in eastern Africa and one in the south of the continent, that were defined by this split. However, few other matrilineal splits from the first 100,000 years of the species's history have survived to the present day. This suggests the early human population was tiny (so the opportunities for new matrilines to evolve in the first place were limited) and reinforces the idea that Homo sapiens may have come close to extinction (eliminating some matrilines that did previously exist). Indeed, there may, at one point, have been as few as 2,000 people left to carry humanity forward. This shrinkage coincides with a period of prolonged drought in eastern Africa, and was probably caused by it. The end of the drought, however, was followed by the appearance of many new matrilines that survive to the present day. The researchers estimate that by 60,000-70,000 years ago, the period when the exodus that populated the rest of the world happened, as many as 40 such groups were flourishing in Africa?though that migration involved only two of these groups. The African matrilines, however, seem to have remained isolated from each other for tens of millennia after the exodus. It was not until 40,000 years ago that they began to re-establish conjugal relations, possibly as a result of the technological revolution of the Late Stone Age, which yielded new and more finely crafted tools. Only the bushmen seem to have missed out on this panmictic party. They were left alone until a few hundred years ago, when their homelands were invaded from the north by other Africans and from the south by Europeans. Panmixis thus came full circle. And that particular party was certainly not a happy one.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080502092145.htm Sun's Movement Through Milky Way Regularly Sends Comets Hurtling, Coinciding With Mass Life Extinctions ScienceDaily (May 2, 2008) ? The sun's movement through the Milky Way regularly sends comets hurtling into the inner solar system -- coinciding with mass life extinctions on earth, a new study claims. The study suggests a link between comet bombardment and the movement through the galaxy. Scientists at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology built a computer model of our solar system's movement and found that it "bounces" up and down through the plane of the galaxy. As we pass through the densest part of the plane, gravitational forces from the surrounding giant gas and dust clouds dislodge comets from their paths. The comets plunge into the solar system, some of them colliding with the earth. The Cardiff team found that we pass through the galactic plane every 35 to 40 million years, increasing the chances of a comet collision tenfold. Evidence from craters on Earth also suggests we suffer more collisions approximately 36 million years. Professor William Napier, of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, said: "It's a beautiful match between what we see on the ground and what is expected from the galactic record." The periods of comet bombardment also coincide with mass extinctions, such as that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Our present position in the galaxy suggests we are now very close to another such period. While the "bounce" effect may have been bad news for dinosaurs, it may also have helped life to spread. The scientists suggest the impact may have thrown debris containing micro-organisms out into space and across the universe. Centre director Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said: "This is a seminal paper which places the comet-life interaction on a firm basis, and shows a mechanism by which life can be dispersed on a galactic scale." The paper, by Professor Napier and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe, is to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080807144236.htm Solar System Is Pretty Special, According To New Computer Simulation ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2008) Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head. The solar system, it turns out, is pretty special indeed. The study illustrates that if early conditions had been just slightly different, very unpleasant things could have happened -- like planets being thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space. Using large-scale computer simulations, the Northwestern researchers are the first to model the formation of planetary systems from beginning to end, starting with the generic disk of gas and dust that is left behind after the formation of the central star and ending with a full planetary system. Because of computing limitations, earlier models provided only brief glimpses of the process. The researchers ran more than a hundred simulations, and the results show that the average planetary system's origin was full of violence and drama but that the formation of something like our solar system required conditions to be "just right." The study was recently published in the journal Science. Before the discovery in the early 1990s of the first planets outside the solar system, our system's nine (now eight) planets were the only ones known to us. This limited the planetary formation models, and astronomers had no reason to think the solar system unusual. "But we now know that these other planetary systems don't look like the solar system at all," said Frederic A. Rasio, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is senior author of the Science paper. "The shapes of the exoplanets' orbits are elongated, not nice and circular. Planets are not where we expect them to be. Many giant planets similar to Jupiter, known as 'hot Jupiters,' are so close to the star they have orbits of mere days. Clearly we needed to start fresh in explaining planetary formation and this greater variety of planets we now see." Using the wealth of exoplanet data collected during the last 15 years, Rasio and his colleagues have been working to understand planet formation in a much broader sense than was possible previously. Modeling an entire planetary system -- the varied physical phenomena associated with gas, gravity and grains of material, on such a variety of scales -- was a daunting challenge. The work required very powerful computers. The researchers also had to judiciously decide what information was important and what was not, so as to speed up the calculations. They decided to follow the growth of planets, the gravitational interaction between planets, and the whole planetary system in its entire spatial extent. They chose not to follow the gas disk's fluid dynamics in fine detail, but rather more generally. As a result, they were able to run simulations spanning a planetary system's entire formation. The simulations suggest that an average planetary system's origin is extremely dramatic. The gas disk that gives birth to the planets also pushes them mercilessly toward the central star, where they crowd together or are engulfed. Among the growing planets, there is cut-throat competition for gas, a chaotic process that produces a rich variety of planet masses. Also, as the planets approach each other, they frequently lock into dynamical resonances that drive the orbits of all participants to be increasingly elongated. Such a gravitational embrace often results in a slingshot encounter that flings the planets elsewhere in the system; occasionally, one is ejected into deep space. Despite its best efforts to kill its offspring, the gas disk eventually is consumed and dissipates, and a young planetary system emerges. "Such a turbulent history would seem to leave little room for the sedate solar system, and our simulations show exactly that," said Rasio. "Conditions must be just right for the solar system to emerge." Too massive a gas disk, for example, and planet formation is an anarchic mess, producing "hot Jupiters" and noncircular orbits galore. Too low-mass a disk, and nothing bigger than Neptune -- an "ice giant" with only a small amount of gas -- will grow. "We now better understand the process of planet formation and can explain the properties of the strange exoplanets we've observed," said Rasio. "We also know that the solar system is special and understand at some level what makes it special." "The solar system had to be born under just the right conditions to become this quiet place we see. The vast majority of other planetary systems didn't have these special properties at birth and became something very different." ### In addition to Rasio, other authors of the Science paper are Edward W. Thommes, an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, former postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern and lead author, and Soko Matsumura, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. The computer simulations were performed on a supercomputing cluster operated by Northwestern's Theoretical Astrophysics Group and partially funded by a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Rasio's research group on exoplanets also is funded by a grant from the NSF Division of Astronomy.