Is the Earth really a special being in the universe?
It’s just the third planet of the ‘yellow dwarf star’
I have a suspicion that it is causing a mass extinction.
“Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” This is the title given to Paul Gauguin’s 1898 painting on the Isle of Thaiti. To the first of these questions, we know the obvious answer. We are all children of stars. Not in a symbolic sense, but in a scientific sense. Water, which accounts for 70% of the human body, consists of oxygen and hydrogen. The next many proteins and fats are compounds made up of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. In addition, iron, magnesium, sodium, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, etc. contain little by little.
The origin of these elements lies in the universe. Hydrogen was created regarding 380,000 years following the Big Bang, which created the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Small amounts of helium and trace amounts of lithium were also produced at this time. These hydrogen clouds coalesced to form a star, and nuclear fusion began in the center of the star to produce other elements one following another. As a result, oxygen, carbon, neon, silicon, and iron were formed via helium. Heavier gold, lead, and uranium were formed when very massive stars eventually exploded in supernovae.
The solar system was born regarding 4.56 billion years ago from a nebula (star cloud), a collection of remnants of these supernovae. The nebula’s diameter, composed mainly of hydrogen, would have spanned the distance that light travels in one year, or one light-year. Another supernova exploded around the star cloud, and the shock wave shook the scattered star cloud, causing it to clump together. As a result, the sun, which accounts for more than 99% of the total mass of the solar system, and the tiny planets orbiting it were created.
Earth is a combination of planets in orbit around the third from the inside. The elements that make up our body were also established on Earth at that time. As a result of irradiating light from stars in our galaxy, that is, the Milky Way, the composition of the human body and the composition of the stars were found to be 97% identical. According to the results of an analysis of 150,000 stars with an astronomical telescope in New Mexico, USA in 2017, it is true.
This is a question that mankind cannot shake off. Are we alone in space? Humanity continues to build and launch spacecraft and telescopes at great expense because of their quest to know their place in space. It is also one of the main missions of ‘James Webb’, a state-of-the-art infrared space telescope launched at the end of last year at a cost of $10 billion by the United States, Europe and Canada. Located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the Webb is six times larger than the existing Hubble Telescope and has 100 times more powerful observation capabilities.
We can see the light of the past 13.5 billion years, that is, the light 100 to 250 million years following the Big Bang. This means that we can see the first stars and galaxies forming in the darkness of the early universe. Objects that are very far away become very faint or invisible in the visible region. This is because the light that reaches us has a longer wavelength and turned into infrared light while passing through the still expanding universe. This is why the web is designed for near-infrared and mid-infrared observations.
Let’s go back to the second question in the headline. Who are we? It is a species at the top of the global food chain. It is suspected of causing the sixth mass extinction in biological history. It is a species that is destroying the environment and changing the climate to the extent that it is now called the geological age of the ‘Anthropocene’. What we need to know is that the Earth is not in a special position in space. There are over 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and one of them, our own galaxy, has over 400 billion stars. We live on the third planet of a yellow dwarf star regarding a third of the galaxy’s center. This planet is but “a speck of dust floating in the light of the sun,” or “pale blue dot” (Carl Sagan).
