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Planet Earth: Lucky Accident?
Leslie Wickman, Ph.D.
With credits to NASA, Ron Cottrell, author of The Remarkable Spaceship Earth,
Mark Ritter @ SwordAndSpirit.com,John Bloom @ Biola University,
and Reasons to Believe @ reasons.org
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Lucky Design? – location and size
• Earth’s Location: distance from sun
• Earth’s Size: gravity, atmosphere, heat
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• Our gravity is just right to keep this thin layer of gases above us.
• Earth’s atmosphere:– Acts as insulating blanket – Protects us from harmful radiation– Perfect composition to support life
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• Our liquid center gives us the magnetic field which protects us from the deadly solar winds...
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solar wind particles creep through magnetic field at earth’s north & south poles
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• Our atmosphere:– 78% nitrogen– 21% oxygen– 1% trace gases
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• The thin invisible ozone layer keeps us alive by absorbing dangerous radiation from space.
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• Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere helps to keep us warm.
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Water vapor permeates the atmosphere, delivering rain & keeping us warm...
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Lightning strikes once a second on this planet.
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Lucky Design? - rotation
Rotation rate: 1x / 24 hours- slower: daily temps more extreme- faster: tropics warmer, poles colder
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Lucky Design?- axial tilt
• 23.5 degree tilt -> seasons – 2x farmland
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Lucky Design? - our Moon
- only one - bigger or closer… - smaller or farther… - perfect size for solar eclipses!
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Lucky Design?- crust
Earth’s crust: ranges from 4 miles thick in ocean basins to 30
miles thick under some mountain peaks.- thicker or thinner?
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Lucky Design?- water cycle
Earth is the only place we know of with water existing as solid, liquid, and gas,
necessary for life…
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Venus, Earth’s so-called
“sister planet”…slightly smaller and a little closer to
the Sun…
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Mars, smaller & a little farther out…
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Our planetary big brothers Jupiter and Saturn…
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1994: Comet Shoemaker-Levy
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Considering the Sun:G2, medium sized, middle aged
perfect brightness, size and age for life
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change anything, no life!
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Our sun appears to be a single star…
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 1
2nd Star: 70% mass of the Sun
3.3 AU from the Sun
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 2
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 3
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 4
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 5
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 6
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Earth in a Binary Star System - 7
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Fine-tuning throughout the universe
• Velocity of light
• Electromagnetic force
• Strong nuclear force
• Expansion rate of universe
• Mass density of the universe
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All this perfection is so improbable!Probability for 9 life-supporting design characteristics existing in one of the 9 traditional planets of our solar
system:
1 in 50 million
• If we consider ~ 322 finely tuned characteristics of the entire universe, the odds are more like 1 in 10282 for such a planet to exist anywhere in the cosmos!
“The impression of design is overwhelming.”- Paul Davies, physicist, The Cosmic Blueprint
“A superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”
- Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, The Universe
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Dumb Luck, or Purposeful Order?“…the degree of bio-friendliness we observe in the universe seems far in excess of what is needed to give rise to a few observers… If the ingenious bio-friendliness of our universe were the result of randomness, we might expect the observed universe to be minimally, rather than optimally, biophilic. Note too, that multi-verse explanations still need to assume the existence of laws of some sort, so they do not offer a complete explanation of the law-like order of the universe. Finally, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain certain features of the universe we do observe seems the antithesis of Occam’s Razor: It is an infinitely complex explanation.”
- Paul Davies, theoretical physicist