Almost everywhere on Earth you see life in the air, water and even the underground depths.
However, we do know that there have been massive extinctions in the past, taking away most of life on Earth. Does this worry us?
Does the climate support life in 3 to 4 billion years?
Since life formed and spread on the blue planet, there has not been any event that has completely eradicated life. However, this is still an interesting thing because despite some supposedly serious events, the Earth’s climate has remained relatively stable for 3-4 billion years, but perhaps due to … luck.
This is considered a strange phenomenon because we know that stars like the Sun get hotter as they age, and the Sun has long been around 30% weaker. Which means the ancient Earth should have been frozen, or assuming it was sand, maybe the Earth is boiling right now. Reality didn’t work out that way and that’s the mystery.
This is known as the “Faint Young Sun Paradox” and leads many scientists to assume that the Earth has some type of thermostat, a set of conditions that tend to rebalance a system out of a state of affairs. Unstable so that it is not too hot or too cold. It would be a negative feedback system, if a condition arises that causes the Earth to warm up, things will change so that it is cooled again.
Also, if you release too much carbon dioxide into the air, the oceans will heat up, it will release more CO2 and you will have a feedback loop that ends badly as we are seeing today. If there is too little CO2 in the air, the Earth will freeze.
Due to chance or mechanism?
To find out, Professor Toby Tyrrell harnessed the power of the Iridis supercomputer at the University of Southampton (UK) and created simulations of 100,000 planets! In it, each planet receives a set of random climatic responses, some negative and some positive, while monitoring their temperature over a hypothetical 3 billion years and zero period. Other variables must be simulated.
For the sake of simplicity, he just wanted to see if a planet could maintain the temperature at which life could last as long as Earth.
Clearly the simulated responses are not based on actual responses such as CO2 in the air, instead he assigns the planets random mathematical feedback, strict arithmetic situations to see what happened. . Each planetary simulation was then run 100 times, with slightly modified variations, to see what was happening with the temperatures.
This is not about creating a full climate simulation, but simply about seeing how important a role opportunity plays in a planet’s sustainability. He tests two hypotheses. The first is that feedback has no effect, so it all depends on random fluctuations.
It is pure luck if a planet has been in a habitable zone for billions of years. The second is that having feedback, whether negative or positive, guarantees success or failure and it likely doesn’t play a role.
In other words, he’s hoping to see if climate feedback is really keeping Earth alive for that long or just luck. A planet is considered viable if its temperature remains stable for more than 3 billion years.
Looking at the range of results and how they happened, his conclusion is that random reactions and chance play a role in the planet’s ability to maintain the living temperature of all species. Although sample success rates vary, factor variation in 100 trials still supports the idea that mechanism and expediency play an important role above.
However, whether this applies to our Earth or not is still something that needs more research as these are just simple experiences. We don’t really know how strong and resilient the Earth is, but it has survived to this day in part by luck.
Interestingly, out of 100,000 planets, only 9% succeed at least once. Some planets succeed twice, sometimes three times … In fact, considering the 100,000 planets, we all have 1 to 100 successful operations.
However, only one planet has passed 100 times in 100 tries. It is a powerful planet, showing that nothing can prevent it from being a pleasant place to live (at least in temperature).
