/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12731453
Also,

>Literally every single picture of space that NASA has released has been very obviously and incompetantly altered in some way, either by using a fisheye lense as seen in the pic, having it black and white for some nonsense pseudoscientific reason, having a tiny disclaimer saying "This is just artistic license" like we see with all the Hubble pictures, or just by "losing the original photo"
This is fucking bullshit, there's a shitload of original photos available starting with this famous pic from the Apollo mission.

This is the Earth in a plain, 1969 color photo.
No fish eye lens. No black and white. No CGI. No composite imaging.

>>11946559
Mommy is a special planet with very unique characteristics. A combination of orbiting a stable main sequence star on its Goldilocks Zone on a system with stable orbits, on an orbit with very low eccentricity, with liquid water, just the right amount of inclination and atmosphere to redistribute heat evenly, on a fast rotation, with a strong magnetic shield, a disproportionately large moon that allowed warm tidal pools to form, and a big gas giant protecting the inner solar system from asteroids. Several mass extinctions timed at just the proper times gave a push to the evolution of more and more intelligent life without wiping out life altogether.

It's not likely that there are many other planets sharing all these same characteristics as Mommy. Thus life is very rare and intelligent life even more so.

>>11941692
There are much more barriers at N° 1 alone.

It's not just "the right star system".
For the conditions on Earth you need:

1. A star that is stable on the main sequence for billions of years. Many stars do not fulfill this criteria, though billions of them do. K-type and G-type stars seem the most likely.

2. A star that is bright enough to avoid tidal locking on its Goldilocks Zone. This rules out most red dwarfs. It's very unlikely there is life on tidally-locked worlds like those of the Trappist system. The window for the evolution of life on such worlds would be very narrow and basically limited to the terminator zone (permanent twilight zone between the ultrahot day hemisphere and the ultracold night hemisphere).

3. A rocky or watery planet located on the Goldilocks Zone on such a system, able to support liquid water.

4. The planet in question needs to have liquid water.

5. If the planet in question is rocky, it definitively needs to have a breathable atmosphere of sorts to keep temperatures spread even and life possible.

6. The atmosphere must have a low content of greenhouse gases to avoid a runaway greenhouse effect as in Venus.

7. The planet in question needs to have the proper size, and thus the proper pressure to support liquid water. Too great pressure will only support ice. Too low pressure and it will only have vapour and ice.

8. The planet in question needs to have magnetic shield strong enough so that it doesn't lose its atmosphere over the years.

9. The planet in question needs to have an orbit with a very low eccentricity so as to not suffer from extreme "seasons", avoiding crust-melting summers and ice age winters.

The more I learn, the more I realize the absolutely mindbogglingly insane conditions that had to coincide to create intelligent life on Earth.

First, Earth itself is a rocky planet, with just the right "Goldilocks" distance to the Sun to support liquid water, with just the right material composition, with an orbit that has very low eccentricity, located on a solar system that is stable, with Jupiter acting as a shield against interstellar asteroids and debris, and it also happens to have a disproportionately large Moon that serves to regulate the tides, which allowed life to emerge on tidal pools that otherwise wouldn't have formed.

Not only that, but Theia's collision with an early Earth helped to shift its axial tilt to a position that creates mild-ish seasons, and also served to slow down Earth's rotation from 10 hours to 24 hours.

Then, after the emergence of life, there were several extinction events that could have gone very differently, either wiping life altogether, or not wiping it out which would have led to life on Earth being very different. The right conditions just so happened that favoured the disappearance of the slow-witted, titanic dinosaur life of the Jurassic and favoured the evolution of smarter, smaller animals like birds and mammalians, with larger brains that consume much more oxygen but smaller bodies. Out of all these mammalians, the right conditions favoured apes to climb down from the trees and move to the Savannas, which again favoured larger intelligence as socialization became a requisite for survival in the large hunter-gatherer tribes of early hominins. Out of all these different types of hominins, Homo Sapiens managed to win out the evolutionary game against Neanderthals, both competed for the same food sources and (roughly) habitats, but it was the Humans that managed to win and drive out the Neanderthals to extinction in no small part thanks to our domestication of dogs which gave us an edge in hunting.