Do our illustrious astronomers and astrophysicists have any explanation why only Earth...?

Question

is so unique among the heavenly bodies? Excluding the theory of "intelligent creation", there has to be some scientific explanation why only Earth has complex living things and no other planets or stars. After all these scientist were able to explain the birth of galaxies and black holes.

Answer 1

Of course there is an explanation.  You live here;  just how many planets have you visited lately?  There are probably many billions of planets out there that are just as hospitable to life as we know it as Earth is;  but, they are scattered among a vast distance that we have yet to learn to navigate.

Answer 2

Biochemistry would work just the same anywhere else in the universe as it does here.  We're not likely unique in anyway.  The precursors for life can be found in the interstellar medium, and I'd be surprised if some kind of life wasn't out there, if not reasonably common, for given definitions.

We only know of 307 outside our solar system.  I suspect there are a lot of planets we still don't know about.

By the way you phrased your question, though, I'm taking it you don't believe anything other than what you want to hear.  You've already picked a best answer, and you're just looking for one person to confirm it.  But the truth of the matter is, we don't have all the answers now, but Science never will.  We're not trying to get all the answers; we're trying to figure out what is really there, not what we want to be there.  Math and Physics take care of Blackholes and Galaxies, but it's much harder to explain the origins of something we can't observe for the moment.

The only thing unique about Earth, is that is has a bunch of naked apes on it who think they look like God.

Answer 3

How is Earth unique, exactly?  We've only been to two different objects (Moon and Mars) and we were pretty sure they didn't have life.  But there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone, and billions of galaxies in the universe.  We certainly can't conclude there's no life out there anywhere else after seeing two of them.

Answer 4

Remeber my friend that there is water on mars and bacteria although now dead there has may have been life or cells microbes alive on mars in the past :)

Answer 5

Galaxies and black holes have simple mathematical explanations: gravity.  Life is a lot more complicated.

Answer 6

Carbon.  And the conditions which allow it to form complex molecules.  For that to happen, liquid water is essential.  Its polar characteristics with the weak hydrogen bonds, along with other elements available at the time, (primarily nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen), makes the fundamental complexity of life possible.  The earth is the only planet with the right characteristics for all these things.  It has a light atmosphere with pressures which are feasible for lots of chemical reactions.  

All the other planets are too cold or too hot, or they have inadequate atmospheres or no surfaces.

So just think of it as a Goldilocks world.  "...but this planet was juuust right!"

Answer 7

If we were the only life in the universe, it would be a terrible waste of space.

Answer 8

life as we know it......may exist [ in different form,s]...with in our solar system..........life not known to us is more likely.......but we have just begun to identify earth like planet,s in other system,s around distant star,s.......it will be a while before we know if they support life.........unless that life is more intelligent than we are......they may have visited us already.

Answer 9

We cannot say that our planet is unique with our current knowledge about our "vast" universe, because we have not explored even a fractional part of our Universe.

There may be several heavenly bodies that are more stunning in bio-diversity(as we call it) than our own planet.

Answer 10

becuase we're just between where water vaporizes, and it freezes.... we're in this special zone, and only in this zone can liquid water exist... which is vital to life as we know it.

Answer 11

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee addressed this issue in their book "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe". The gist of it is that so many things have to be right - the right type of star, the right orbital distance, even the right position in the galaxy - to provide a stable environment for the development of life, that life-supporting planets are in fact quite rare.

Of course, our ability to detect other Earth-like planets is still very limited, so we don't have a basis to declare that *no* other planets have life.

Answer 12

We have not yet located other earths because of size and distance - that will change within the next 2 to 5 years as our tech is on the verge of being able to locate them.

Answer 13

Without bringing religion into it, the conditions that prevail on Earth are a miracle.  The only reason it is hard to appreciate that, is that we are here, and so we like to think life would be a common occurrence.  But we are only here because of the series of miracles that makes Earth unique:

You have to bear in mind that life basically survives between the freezing and boiling points of water.  That range of temperature is miniscule in the scheme of things, yet the Earth has maintained its biosphere within that tiny range for about 3 billion years.  That is phenomenal, and some scientists argue that the special conditions that keep this status quo may indeed be unique in the universe.  

Remember that even today with all our science, technology and probes, we have not found one piece of evidence that life exists anywhere else in the universe.

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nintfjr - chemistry does not make life.  It doesn't matter what chemistry is discovered in inter-stellar clouds, nobody, not the top scientists, have any idea how you change chemistry into life.  

Until they know that, or until some probe digs up a microbe on Mars or some other planet, nobody can argue 100% for there being life outside of this one.

Answer 14

simple, astronomers don't pretend to know that the earth is unique in the universe, considering that they have so far succeeded in observing a handful of planets of earth mass or lower, 4 of which are very easy to see by virtue of being located in this solar system. other such planets may be out there but are too faint to be seen with current technology.  thus your claimed 'facts' which you think call for an explanation may not actually be facts at all. if you pin your hopes on the continued ignorance of scientists, you may rather soon be disppointed as technology continues to improve. 15 years ago it may have been possible to claim that planet formation is a rare process, possibly unique to the solar system. but astronomers have now detected over 300 extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars. all of them are much larger than earth (typically they are similar to jupiter or saturn), but those are also the easiest to see. if large planets can be formed, surely so can smaller ones, so there is no good scientific reason to think that earth mass planets are not out there somewhere.

one rather obvious distinguishing feature of earth that seems quite important for earthlike life is that earth has liquid water on its surface. there are fairly obvious reasons why mars, venus and mercury don't have oceans!

Answer 15

Only Earth is already wrong. It is only Earth in our limited known view of the universe.

Let's say, the Milky Way is only as big as the USA. Then the region we where we are currently able to spot other planets is only as large as your house.

So, saying that there is not other life in space is like sitting in a small block house in the rocky mountains, look around inside it and say: I am the last human in this country.

Even worse: For telling that there is life on such a planet, we would have to take a much closer look. Currently, we can't even say that there is life on a planet next door, without landing a probe on it.

So, how can we know? In our own limited view, we are something special. But our own view is so limited, that we are effectively blind for other life.

There could be many rocky planets with life only 50-100 LY away from Earth (which is minimal compared to the 60,000 LY of the Milky Way) - and we can't see them and can't even tell that there is life on them.

And thus, we can't even say that we are something special in the universe, we are just something special in our own view.

Also, the few radio messages we send to the universe yet, are pretty useless. If somebody would send a message to us, we wouldn't notice, so why should somebody else? SETI has only a limited chance to catch such a "once in a lifetime" message, like we sent. And our own emissions are, when seen from some distance, just strong electromagnetic noise. How can we even expect another civilization in space to be something else to us?

Answer 16

It is interesting that there were no microbes - until we could see them with a microscope.

Other worlds with life on them...?  we can't even detect an Earth sized planet going around the nearest star let alone see if it has an atmosphere.  We can't detect oxygen in the atmosphere of any extrasolar planet.

Why Earth?  If it wasn't so - we wouldn't be here to wonder "why?"

Answer 17

and your proof that our galaxy, let alone our universe, is not swarming with complex living things is what exactly???  I'm really interested in hearing about it since we cannot even determine if their are planets this size in the next closest star system.