Humanity may not be extraordinary, but rather the natural evolutionary result of our planet and probably of others, according to a new model that tries to explain how intelligent life was developed on earth.
The theory suggests that perhaps it was not so difficult or unlikely, according to a team of researchers from the State University of Pennsylvania, United States, which points out that this interpretation of the origin of humanity “increases the probability of intelligent life in other parts of the universe ”
Your proposal, described in the magazine Science Advancescontradicts the defendant model for decades, according to which smart life was an “incredibly unlikely” event, the authors emphasize.
This is “a significant change” in the way in which you think about the history of life, indicates in a statement from Jennifer Macalady University, a professor of geosciences.
“It suggests that the evolution of complex life can have less to do with luck and more with the interaction between life and its environment, opening new and exciting ways of research in the search to understand our origins and place in the universe.”
In the new study, the team formed by astrophysicists and geobiologists defends that the environment of the Earth was initially inhospitable for many life forms and that the key evolutionary steps were only possible when the global environment reached a “permissive” state.
For example, complex animal life requires a certain level of oxygen in the atmosphere, so the oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere through microbes and photosynthesizing bacteria was a natural evolutionary step for the planet, which created “a window of opportunity” For more recent ways of life.
Intelligent life as an obvious result
Thus, the work proposes that the chronology of human origins can be explained by the sequential opening of “habitability windows” throughout the history of the earth, driven by changes in nutrient availability, the temperature of the sea surface , the salinity levels of the oceans and the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Taking into account all these factors, the Earth has become hospitable for humanity for a short time: “It is simply the natural result of these conditions,” summarizes the authors.
“We argue that intelligent life may not require a series of hits of luck to exist,” explains Dan Mills, before at the University of Pennsylvania and now in Munich’s, Germany.
According to the researcher, humans did not evolve “soon” or “afternoon” in the history of the earth, but “on time”, when the conditions were given.
And he adds: “Maybe it’s just a matter of time, and perhaps other planets are able to achieve these conditions faster than Earth, while others could take even more.”
“We consider that, instead of baseing our predictions on the useful life of the sun -as other models do -we should use a geological time scale, because it is the time that takes time to change the atmosphere and the landscape,” adds Jason Wright, Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor in Pennsylvania.
Researchers plan to test their alternative model with works that include, among others, the search for biofirms in planet atmospheres outside the solar system, such as the presence of oxygen.
With EFE information.
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