Geek Soap Box

Mankind is simultaneously blessed and cursed by its unending intellectual and philosophical curiosity; the grand desire to understand how things work, and why we are here, drive all of our greatest achievements — and failures.

To that extent, is there any “Big Question” more interesting, passionate, and frustrating than the one concerning our origins?  How did we wind up on this earth?  Was it the product of a series of evolutionary adaptations, or part of the grand design of a supreme intelligence?  Do other planets in the near-limitless expanse of the universe house similar lifeforms?

I’m here today to tell you that we will never know the answer, and in fact the most likely answer is that we are utterly alone in this journey across the stars, the product of a incredible series of cosmic accidents, and that even if life exists elsewhere, it could very well be a form we would never even be able to comprehend, or recognize as life.

Life on earth exists as it does because our planet nearly perfectly supports it in this form.  But how our planet got here is perhaps the most amazing and uncanny story of them all.

Long before life, approximately 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized planet residing in orbit at a Lagrange Point — a point where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Sun are nearly equal — smacked into the earth at an odd angle and lead to the formation of the Moon.  Scientists refer to this event as the Giant Impact Hypothesis, and it is now the accepted theory related to circumstances of events that brought us to where we are today.  Indeed, the ramifications from such a cataclysmic, literally world-changing event proved numerous and integral.

The remains of most of the wayward planet actually wound up absorbed into the earth’s core, Unicron style.  It is for this reason the earth has an unusually dense core, compared to other planets, one also composed of unique outer and inner iron halves — and why our planet has a far higher density, gravitational pull, and magnetic field than comparable planets throughout the Solar System.  The increased gravity keeps our atmosphere more closely affixed to the planetary surface — as opposed to eventually dissipating into outer space as on Mars or the moon — and the powerful magnetic field protects life’s fragile cells from the devastating effects of solar radiation.  Without the impact, it is questionable at best if life would have ever even emerged.

The resultant duality of the earth/moon journey through the cosmos further impacts the behavior of the planet to this day.  The gravitational tug of such a large moon (far larger than any other satellite relative to planet size in our Solar System) actually serves to straighten out the wobbly rotation of the earth along its axis, keeping it relatively consistently straight up and down within small variations.  Fortunately, this consistency adds far more stability to the changing of the seasons, allowing for gradual, less drastic changes and more temperate climes.  Without the moon, the earth might tilt as far as 90 degrees during its orbit, flipping climates at the extremes from equatorial to polar at the whims of rotational movement.

The moon also influences the tides, the tug and pull over the great oceans that cover so much of the planet.  As the waters wax and wane with regularity each day, in many areas small tidal pools — collections of water amidst otherwise land dry from the receding flows — form.  It was in these tidal pools, many millions or billions of years ago, that many scientists speculate watery life first learned to crawl out of the ocean and onto land, which in turn gave birth eventually to us.

There are so many other unique sustaining factors to the continued growth of life on the earth that it’s nearly impossible to account for them all.  Have you ever given any thought to how symbiotic and perfect it is that nearly half of the living creatures on the planet use oxygen and release carbon dioxide as waste, while the other half use carbon dioxide and release oxygen, ensuring a never-ending supply of both?  Or how about how the earth’s atmosphere is composed mostly of nitrogen, a mostly inert and nonreactive gas that doesn’t explode or do much of anything?  Oh, and what about the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs and allowed our little mousy forefathers to inherit the earth?

Now, I’m not the Bad Astronomer, and I have no expertise in any of the science brought forth above.  I’m just a very interested man who has watched countless specials on the History and Discovery Channels and done a little light reading (even the links above go to Wikipedia for the sake of simplicity).

So where does that leave us in our quest for the Big Picture?

For starters, it feels extraordinarily unlikely that — even in the limitless vastness of outer space — we will ever locate another planet orbiting a star with a history and circumstances that match our own.  That doesn’t mean it cannot happen in the possibilities of  infinity, it just means that searching for our twin might be, well, infinitely harder than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Meanwhile, who knows what else may be out there, in a fashion that we cannot comprehend?  Perhaps, without the extinction event of a massive collision, giant, brilliant, cold-blooded lizard kings roam far away lands?  Who determined that life even must exclusively derive from carbon and complex organic molecules as we know them?  Some distant planet may be composed of silicone-based life — like giant, waddling, sentient breast implants — or perhaps even be mechanical in origins, or composed of molten rock or mud, or even an entire planet itself is “alive” or “feeling” out there.  Here, the XKCD cartoon above is useful in illustrating our folly.

That doesn’t mean the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should not be conducted — or even encouraged.  While I’m skeptical that aliens came down to earth and influenced the Egyptians or Mayans, exploration of space is the last great Manifest Destiny, and the task upon which future generations will hang their hats.

So what of a Creator, and all-knowing Grand Designer inserting His Divine Hand into our development and very existence?  In some ways, the incredible series of events detailed above could be said to reinforce a form of intelligent design: knowing what End Game would be required for human life, one could see the formative years of the earth as a series of “adjustments” to get where the planet needed to be to serve as a happy host.  Of course, this would likely also simultaneously require the earth to be far older than 6,000 years of age, so I will not hold my breath and say I’ve uncovered the philosophical bridge between science, evolution, and creationism.

There are no easy solutions or answers to the Big Questions of an Existential Nature.  But it’s a quintessentially human trait to think about and want to find the answers at any cost.  It’s also a lot of fun to think about.