Planet Earth has managed to stay inhabited for so long for one simple reason: strength.
Researchers at the University of Sourthhampton performed mass simulations of climate evolution from 100,000 randomly generated planets.
Each planet has been simulated a hundred times with random climate-changing events that have occurred each time to see if habitable life can be sustained for three billion years as on Earth.
Of these planets, 9 percent (8700) were successful at least once, but almost all of them (about 8000) were less than 50 times out of 100 successful and most (about 4500) were less than ten times out of 100 successful.
Professor Toby Tyrrell, a specialist in Earth Systems Science, said that the results of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, suggested that chance is an important factor in determining whether planets, such as the Earth, life can cherish more than billions. of years.
“A consistently stable and habitable climate on Earth is quite enigmatic. Our neighbors, Mars and Venus, do not have habitable temperatures, even though Mars once did,” Professor Tyrrell said.
‘The earth today not only has a habitable temperature, but also always maintains it for three to four billion years – an extraordinary period of geological time.
We can now understand that the earth has remained fit for life for so long, at least in part, because of happiness, ”he continued.
A number of other large-scale events could have occurred to alter the Earth’s habitability, for example if a slightly larger asteroid hit the Earth, or did so at another time.
“If an intelligent observer were present on the early earth when life first evolved, and could calculate the chances that the planet would remain habitable for the next few billion years, the calculation might have revealed very poor chance,” Professor Tyrrell added. . .
This poor chance means that the chances of finding habitable “twin Earths” elsewhere in the universe are also very slim – especially what astronomers have focused on as interstellar missions increase.
Additional reporting by agencies