This magical astronomical object that came to exist in the right place, at the time, evolved to harbor life giving us the opportunity to live. We do know what’s happening on Earth but what’s in it, how it came to be, what’s it made of? Lets read about our own now – the only planet whose name didn’t take up after Greek or a Roman God.
Need to knows only. I promise!
The origin of life on Earth is still up for debate.
Formation: & few deets:
About 4 billion years ago, a solar nebula partitions a volume out of a molecular cloud by a gravitational collapse. This begin to spin and flatten into a circumstellar disk which formed the planet that we live in.
- We all know Earth revolves around the Sun every 365 days. Well, that’s not exactly the right number. Its actually 365.2564 days. That .2564 in that decimal is why we have leap years. We compensate this by adding one extra day every four years!
- The same goes with rotation. Its is not 24 hours, its 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds to be precise. We all like rounding up, hope that four minutes doesn’t make a difference.
- Earth tilts at approximately 66 degrees. This tilt is responsible for Earth’s habitat in so many ways. This precise tilt, measures how much light reaches the Earth’s surface and plays a major role in the seasonal changes and the daily rotation cycle.
- The planet is mostly made of iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium. Keep digging down the Earth’s core, its 88% iron and 47% is of oxygen.
- Here’s the most known fact, 70% percent of the surface is covered with water – hence the name Blue Planet.
- Earth’s atmosphere consists of 78% of nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon and the rest are of traces of other gases including water vapor. The lowest part of the atmosphere is fairly warm and undergoes all sorts of “science” to form the different types of weather we experience today.
Origin of Life:
There are many theories around this starting with “Gods did it” (no offense to any religion whatsoever). Then, scientists and other believers came up different theories including life came from Mars, traveled via meteors/asteroids from distant galaxies/planet and so on.
One theory that took strong hold on the scientific world is, Evolution.
Yes, the theory is that that we evolved from something that begin as different species then evolved into primates and human themselves – this original species could be dinosaurs, any type of fishes or even a type of rat. We may not actually look like them, but if we examine our DNA in a cellular level, they are similar to what the original species could have been.
Scientists tried to map these cells to drill down what species that were a close match to Bacteria or a branch of them. Reference paper here. Putting these together, scientists narrow down the timeline for origin of life to almost 3.5 billion years ago. Yeah, we are that old.
Earth’s timeline:
Without getting into too many details, here is an info-graph about our planet’s timeline:
Future:
We know where we are now, but what does the further holds? A question we all ask as humans in our deep thoughts about “Life”, but no one wanted to sneak a peak into Earth’s future itself.
In short, Earth is heading to doom of course, like every planet in any solar system.
Our Sun is a burning star, when it runs out of fuel, its going to dim down, becomes a red giant. And then, boom! Like any other star when it dies out, It will take all the planets in its proximity along with Earth – leaving Mars as the only plausible planet to hold life in this solar system. Of course, humans would be extinct or maybe have colonized a different planet or a galaxy if we are lucky.
This is only when a cosmic event occurs.
However, Earth may die out because of us humans and what we are doing to our own home. Yes, Global Warming. If we do not take care of our planet, we don’t have to wait for any cosmic even to destroy this beautiful chunk of lucky rock that could sustain life.
Save your home as long as its under your care. Including me.
