The ID Report
Post details: Grappling with Earth's rarity
12/09/11
Grappling with Earth's rarity
by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
In "Life on Earth: Is our planet special?" (BBC News , 9 December 2011), Howard Falcon-Lang tells us,
Far from being unique, many now regard Earth as an ordinary lump of space rock and believe that life "out there" is almost inevitable. But could the truth be somewhat more complex?
On Friday, top scientists are meeting at the Geological Society in London to debate this very issue, posing the question: "Is the Earth special?". What emerges is that aspects of our planet and its evolution are remarkably strange.
Prof Monica Grady is a meteorite expert at the Open University. She explained in what sense the Earth could be considered special.
It gets better."Well, there are several unusual aspects of our planet," she said. "First is our strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but it's something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth's liquid outer core. Without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun."
A key barrier to determining the odds of the habitability of other planets has been the need to minimize the ways in which Earth is special. "Special" doesn't mean that no other planets could be like Earth, but that we need to assess our chances rationally.
As opposed to pointless speculation like "Could exoplanets support life that has a different chemical composition?" Absent the proposed composition, who knows?
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!
Pingbacks:
No Pingbacks for this post yet...
The ID Report
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| << < | > >> | |||||
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Search
Categories
Archives
- January 2012 (1)
- December 2011 (20)
- November 2011 (29)
- October 2011 (36)
- September 2011 (29)
- August 2011 (35)
- July 2011 (28)
- June 2011 (26)
- May 2011 (23)
- April 2011 (23)
- March 2011 (25)
- February 2011 (26)
- more...
Linkblog
Links - Groups and Organizations
- Access Research Network
- Discovery Institute
- Evolution News Blog
Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
- Intelligent Design Network (IDNet)
- Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center
- Intelligent Reasoning
A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
- International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)
- Telic Thoughts
We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
- The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
- The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center (IDEA)
- www.themonkeytrial.com
Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
Links - Of General Interest
- A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
- A Quick Guide to Sequenced Genomes
- ARN Related Web Links
- Creation/Evolution Quotes
Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
- CreationEvolutionDesign
Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
- Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
- ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
- John Mark Reynolds Blog
A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
- NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Misc
Syndicate this blog 
What is RSS?
powered by
Original template design by François PLANQUE.
