Is the Earth really a special being in the universe?
It is only the third planet of the “yellow dwarf star”
I suspect it is causing a mass extinction.
▲ Hyunwook Cho, CEO of Science and Communication
“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 island of Thaiti. To the first of these questions, we know the obvious answer. We are all children of the stars. Not in a symbolic sense, but in a scientific sense. Water, which represents 70% of the human body, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen. The next many proteins and fats are compounds consisting of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur. In addition, they gradually contain iron, magnesium, sodium, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, etc.
The origin of these elements lies in the universe. Hydrogen was created about 380,000 years after 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 joined together to form a star, and nuclear fusion began at the center of the star to produce other elements one after the other. As a result, oxygen, carbon, neon, silicon and iron were formed through helium. Heavier gold, lead and uranium formed when very massive stars eventually exploded into supernovae.
The solar system was born about 4.56 billion years ago from a nebula (stellar cloud), a collection of remnants of these supernovae. The diameter of the nebula, composed mainly of hydrogen, would have covered the distance traveled by light in a year, or a light year. Another supernova exploded around the stellar cloud and the shock wave shook the scattered stellar cloud, causing it to aggregate. As a result, the sun, which accounts for over 99% of the total mass of the solar system, and the tiny planets orbiting it were created.
Earth is a combination of planets orbiting the third from the inside. The elements that make up our body were also established on Earth at that time. As a result of the irradiation of light from the stars in our Milky Way, 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, United States, in 2017, this is true.
This is a question that humanity cannot shake off. Are we alone in space? Humanity continues to build and launch spacecraft and telescopes at great expense due to 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 late last year at a cost of $ 10 billion from the United States, Europe and Canada. Located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the Webb is six times the size of the existing Hubble telescope and has 100 times more powerful observation capabilities.
We can see the light of the last 13.5 billion years, that is, the light from 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. This means that we can see the first stars and galaxies forming in the darkness of the early universe. Very distant objects become very faint or invisible in the visible region. This is because the light reaching us has a longer wavelength and has transformed into infrared light as it passes 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 title. Who we are? It is a species at the top of the global food chain. It is suspected to have caused the sixth mass extinction in biological history. It is a species that is destroying the environment and modifying the climate to the point that today it is 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 galaxy, has over 400 billion stars. We live on the third planet of a yellow dwarf star about one third of the galaxy’s center. This planet is nothing more than “a speck of dust floating in the sunlight” or “pale blue dot” (Carl Sagan).
