| ePUB | Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional-and What That Means for Life in the Universe |
| By | |
| ISBN | 0465039995 |
| ISBN-13 | 9780465039999 |
| Publication | 03 August 2025 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Format Type | Hardcover |
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But feeling that I needed to read the book a second time and explore some of the topics in depth in order to fully appreciate Waltham s arguments Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe This book is an antithesis of the Gia theory which claims that bio geological cooling effect of Earth has neutralized the solar warming effect since life began billions of years ago Author rejects this idea and thinks that nothing other than sheer luck can explain the emergence of intelligent life on Earth He explains this anthropic principle beautifully He taught me many interesting facts about Ice ages.
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Even if you don t concur with him Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe The book is on the trail of Rare Earth but principally focussed on the stability of climate and average global temperaturas in the last 500 million years although the sun has increased his power roughly a 5% and by that time the autor says the temperaturas has followed a descending trend as consecuence of very improbable encompass of geological and biological process. Lucky planet for pisces Also makes a incursi n in cosmolgy saying we live in a friendly life universo with the adecuate value of physical constants as the ratio between strong forc and electromagnetic forc that produces for example a stable nucleus of carb n in detriment of berilium and oxigen nucleus all obtained by fussion in the cores of stars.
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Is due just to sheer luck Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe The earth s atmosphere is slowly warming up by the increasing contribution of carbon dioxide in it Scientists are justifiably worried by this global warming because of the uncertainties associated with its causes and mechanisms The greenhouse effect which drives global warming is a very dangerous thing as we can witness on the Venusian surface Its atmosphere is almost fully constituted by carbon dioxide 96% and the associated warming has escalated the surface temperature to a blistering 460 degrees Celsius Compare this to earth s 15 degrees C How come our planet turned out to be an ideal cold spot for life Analysing the earth s past buried in rocks and ocean sediments bring out the picture of a habitable planet for most of its existence This book examines the reason for this life friendliness of earth All parameters that control the weather are free to swing in any direction that can cause havoc.
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Which he joined after a stint in the oil industry as a geologist He is basically a physicist with an immense background in handling various aspects of geology. Lucky zodiac signs today Ancient societies gave our planet a prime position in their mythology and thought that other heavenly bodies revolve around it Modern religion presumed it to be a special creation of God for the benefit of mankind Primacy began to erode in the Renaissance period when thinkers postulated about the likelihood of numerous planets very similar to our earth in the new worlds they were observing with their newly made telescopes Early thinkers attributed earth s privileged position to divine providence.
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Which is a favourite topic of popular science authors But this won t further our ideas on the subject matter because what is known is so few and most of the ideas are only intelligent guesses at best or mere conjectures at worst This narrative goes nowhere The author asks the readers to make use of the internet for viewing pictures of other planets and stars mentioned in the book rather than looking through available telescopes which are of much poor quality then we expect The book is easy to read but no point is made by the author because he claims that all life on earth is due to nothing but luck or good fortune This is an extension of the anthropic principle The saving grace is that he does not attribute divine intervention at any stage Even then.
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We hear a lot these days about climate change Lucky Planet by David Waltham is a book about climate stability four billion years of a relatively stable climate have allowed intelligent life to evolve on Earth This is not to say that potential causes for climate change were absent during this time For example four billion years ago the sun was likely much cooler than it is today Life as we know it could not have developed if other factors had not helped keep the Earth warm The book discusses arcane topics such as precession of the Earth s axis and reasons for ice ages without a single graph diagram or equation I was left fascinated planetary orbit size of the moon greenhouse gases dark energy and much Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe I bought this book because I am always curious about life in the universe but I tend not to believe the little green men and flying saucer type of stories. Lucky planetky This book offers plenty of cohesive evidence that our planet is indeed a very special place and in the grand scheme of things there may not be too many similar in our back yard Perhaps just one per galaxy. EPub Lucky planet fitness However Waltham argues that this is not because life is so hard to produce quite the contrary He argues that we have had unusually long and good weather for billions of years that has allowed life here to flourish beyond what might be possible on other worlds In other words life also got a foothold there but the planets did not offer a stable environment long enough for intelligent life to take hold. Lucky planet calculator Well worth a readso carb n necesary for life is abundantthen said the improbable costitution of our solar system an the nearly exact relation of sizes between moon and earth that prevents gravitational resonance with other planets that would causes chaotical oscilations of the tilt os spin earth axe with climatic catastrophic consecuences. Lucky planet for leo For me the book is no too convingnot too well structured and rather speculative Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe I d never really thought about how extremely fortunate we are to be alive on a planet that has had a stable enough climate for long enough so that complex creatures like us had enough time to evolve The book speculates about how rare this is I learned a lot about the conditions necessary for this kind of stability such as the size of our moon and its distance from earth the angle of earth s axis whether there is a land mass at the poles and several other factors The author is quite willing to entertain views other than his own coming across as humble and engaging as he tries to explain complex scientific topics to an average reader Much to ponder Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe 
Humankind has long fantasized about life elsewhere in the universe And as we discover countless exoplanets orbiting other stars among them rocky super Earths and gaseous Hot Jupiters we become ever hopeful that we may come across extraterrestrial life Yet even as we become aware of the vast numbers of planets outside our solar system it has also become clear that Earth is exceptional The question is why In Lucky Planet astrobiologist David Waltham argues that Earth s climate stability is one of the primary factors that makes it able to support life and that nothing short of luck made such conditions possible The four billion year stretch of good weather that our planet has experienced is statistically so unlikely he shows that chances are slim that we will ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial others. PDF Lucky planet earth Describing the three factors that typically control a planet s average temperature the heat received from its star how much heat the planet absorbs and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere Waltham paints a complex picture of how special Earth s climate really is He untangles the mystery of why although these factors have shifted by such massive measures over the history of life on Earth surface temperatures have never fluctuated so much as to make conditions hostile to life Citing factors such as the size of our Moon and the effect of an ever warming Sun Waltham challenges the prevailing scientific consensus that other Earth like planets have natural stabilizing mechanisms that allow life to flourish. Lucky planet calculator A lively exploration of the stars above and the ground beneath our feet Lucky Planet seamlessly weaves the story of Earth and the worlds orbiting other stars to give us a new perspective of the surprising role chance plays in our place in the universe Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the UniverseFor the most part I found Lucky Planet interesting enough though at times there were gaps when it comes to the possibilities for life elsewhere and no mention at all of the idea that there could be life somewhere else on Earth which uses molecules of the opposite chirality to us suggesting than one separate origin of life There was nothing about the Viking biological experiments which per Michael Brooks pop science books are still thought by some to have shown evidence for life on Mars the experimenter Levin still thinks so and he s not alone. Lucky planet calculator I think the problem with all these theories is that they rely on a gut feeling of how likely life is to arise and once arisen to become intelligent Obviously as Waltham points out repeatedly because we exist conditions are possible in which we can exist and observe a condition called the anthropic principle That tells us nothing in itself about how likely life is to arise though In fact with everything that might indicate how likely life is to arise we have a sample size of one. EPub Lucky planet fitness It s really impossible to scientifically judge I think It depends on whether you decide life is likely or unlikely and follows from there Waltham does discuss all the factors that make Earth a rarity which may constrain life But again sample size of one so how do we know that a planet s satellites or seismic activity or atmosphere or predominant minerals are important or not Life doesn t have to look the same as us but if it did that would go a fair way to confirming Waltham s point we require very specific circumstances to have arisen after all. PDF Lucky planet earth Originally posted here Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe How likely is it that there is a lot of intelligent life in the universe This book considers what it took to get life on earth I had previously read Rare Earth Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe to which the present author briefly refers and so thought that I wouldn t be learning that much that was new But even though Waltham reaches much the same verdict that Ward does he gets there by a different route focusing on climate stability For life to develop we need not just an earth like planet with whatever magic factors bring life into being but we need a planet that stays that way for a long time climate stability So many factors can destabilize a planet s climate How have we managed to evade or counterbalance them all We have already seen the historical Earth oscillate between Snowball Earth and hothouse Earth during fairly astronomically stable times A large moon it turns out may actually destabilize the climate Just the proliferation of life can destabilize the climate as has actually happened in the past a proliferation of pond weeds in the Arctic led to the end of the Paleocene Eocene thermal maximum Earth has been lucky because the gradual cooling of the atmosphere fewer greenhouse gases has been generally counterbalanced by the warming of the sun a factor which as far as we know but we have been able to stave off disaster till now This book investigates the idea that good fortune or plain luck infrequently repeated elsewhere in the universe played a significant role in allowing the long term habitability of earth and shows why it is unlikely to find similarly complex life elsewhere in the universe David Waltham is a lecturer at the University of London whereas the author puts it down to good fortune a good fortune that is inevitable somewhere in a big enough universe As scientific knowledge grew earth became just a chance composition that occurs in a very very rare moment Waltham hints that it has become scientific heresy to question Giordano Bruno s insight of the mediocrity of earth s position He reproduces the story of Bruno which makes us believe that his execution was caused not by the beliefs but by his bothersome proclivity to make enemies of everyone he came into contact with This book then claims that we need to return to a geocentric cosmology in the sense that the earth may be the most interesting place in the observable universe. EPub Lucky planet fitness A good discussion on the greenhouse effect and its influence on warming and cooling the planet is included Carbon dioxide water vapour and methane are effective greenhouse gases that trap infrared rays escaping out of the ground and heat it up like a blanket It is to be remembered here that water vapour is a greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and it is present in huge quantities in the atmosphere Why then are we concerned only with carbon dioxide whose share is a minuscule 0. EPub Lucky planet fitness 04% The author does not answer this question However greenhouse effect is not all evil Without it earth s surface temperature would be directly related only to the amount of heat it received from the sun and how much it reflected back Its temperature would then plummet to 18 degree Celsius from the cosy 15 degrees at present Without this 33 degree temperature rise due to greenhouse effect higher forms of life would not be possible At this point Waltham reminds us that global warming on much larger scales have occurred in the past when carbon dioxide doubled and mean temperature shot up by 8 degree Celsius 250 million years ago This event is called Permo Triassic Mass Extinction and was caused by volcanic eruptions that covered much of present day Siberia It killed off 95% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial species Luckily evolution had only reached the level of trilobites by that time Five such events have occurred in the history of life In each disaster a substantial fraction of existing species died out to be replaced over the next 5 to 10 million years by new animals and plants that evolved from the survivors Temperature is claimed to have oscillated from 50 degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius a change of 100 degrees in all Anyhow in the last 500 million years when visible life proliferated on the face of the earth the swing has been a modest 10 degrees. Luisterboek lucky luke Waltham worked in the oil sector in his professional career and confesses to receive funding from oil corporates for his research One would then naturally conclude that he would cast aspersions or question global warming He does nothing of the sort Not only that he lends support to calculational models used by climate change speculators and declares that he is not able to find much flaw in the software models employed by global warming proponents There are great uncertainties in the prediction of future temperature changes but even very optimistic assumptions predict major difficulties ahead So global warming is here to stay We are now obsessed with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the temperature spikes it can cause This book presents a lot of astronomical issues that can wreak great disasters Earth s axis is wobbling in space and its orbital elongation is sometimes affected by the gravitational pull of other planets There are definite astronomical cycles that contribute to periodic heating and cooling of the planets These have typically large periods like 41000 or 100000 years It may come as a surprise to know that throughout the majority of earth s history our planet has been much warmer than today and almost completely free of any sea ice We are now living through a slightly warm inter glacial period that separates one ice age in the past around 11000 years ago and another ice age in the future. Lucky Planet epubor Any discourse on climate balancing by the biosphere would not be complete without a mention of James Lovelock s Gaia theory Lovelock postulated a complex interaction between earth s life forms and its climate using feedback mechanisms that help to stabilize the weather However Waltham is not very enthusiastic about it blaming the hypothesis of its lack of unambiguous observational support and significant theoretical difficulties An attack on a fundamental level is made when the author warns that Gaia proponents might have got the cause and effect totally wrong Instead of theorising that life contributes to a stable climate it might well be possible that life became viable only due to environmental stability. Lucky planet kr Waltham has incorporated a very long discussion on cosmology in which the physical laws and constants support life in this universe This rakes up the issue of whether multiple universes or multiverses are possible it is to be doubted that he has left that final step in the argument for the readers to make out between the lines. Lucky planet calculator The book is recommended Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe God Gaia or Goldilocks The author is an astrobiologist and a geophysicist at the University of London so he looks at the last two and leans toward Goldilocks the earth like the porridge just happens to be right for life not too hot not too cold It may just be coincidence that explains earth s 4 billion years of good weather that is climate favorable to life and that s how we ve avoided frying or freezing as would have happened to us on other planets In the book we learn odds and ends mini biographies such as Giordano Bruno forerunner of Copernicus a sketch of plate tectonics a brief history of space exploration and the search for exoplanets But the key question is and most of the book s focus is on biological and geological regulation of temperature with assistance from players such as the moon that helps stabilize an otherwise dangerous wobble in the earth s orbit Many folks including many scientists assume that a Gaia type process biological self regulation on a planetary scale aka Daisyworld moderates the climate but Waltham is skeptical such biological feedback systems are as likely to provide positive feedback and thus upset the applecart He creates a Moldy Pineworld model as an illustration We learn how sparse life is in most of the oceans due to a deficiency of iron Azolla a fern that created floating mats that filled up the Arctic Ocean during warmer less saline times that 95% of suns in the universe are smaller than ours and why that is good and bad and that statistically speaking intelligent life has to arise near the end of the habitable period on a planet only 500 million years to go And we learn that once self replicating molecules developed multi cellular organisms independently evolved at least three and maybe as many as ten times in earth s history A good read thought provoking and written at about the level of an intro college science course Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe Lucky Planet can basically be summarised in one sentence it s the anthropic principle stupid The book provides a good summary of basic aspects of climate orbital astronomical considerations geological carbon cycles and radiative physics It goes on to discuss and critique the Gaia hypothesis and emphasises how unusual the Earth is in harbouring the exact right conditions for life for long enough for intelligence to evolve It s fine and features a particularly convincing discussion of anthropogenic climate change from a skeptical perspective but didn t do anything particularly impressive for me Lucky Planet Why Earth is Exceptional and What That Means for Life in the Universe
| Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional-and What That Means for Life in the Universe By David Waltham |
| 0465039995 |
| 9780465039999 |
| 208 |
| Hardcover |
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