A Constantly Habitable Planet Is A Matter Of Luck

 

Pure Luck

The Earth has gone through various climatic and extinction cycles, including a cataclysmic asteroid impact, during its four-billion-year history.

These cycles have not been easy for living things, but despite these difficult periods, the world has remained a habitable place for organisms to evolve.

And a new study suggests that is partly because of pure luck, New Atlas reported.

In his study, researcher Toby Tyrrell used computer simulations to determine how our planet sustained life for such a long time and how luck played into it.

He modeled 100,000 randomly different worlds and simulated how their evolutionary paths – and their temperatures – were affected by climatic shifts over the course of three billion years.

The evolution of each planet was simulated 100 times, with each simulation involving random events inflicted upon the worlds.

The results were staggering: Only one planet out of 100,000 maintained habitability in all of its simulations, while the rest had a probability of being habitable rather than a certainty of it.

Tyrell explained that the results show that Earth’s ability to hold life wasn’t a simple inevitability, but rather that our planet “stayed suitable for life for so long due, at least in part, to luck.”