Within a geological blink on an eye, a span of only 10 million years, the number of species on the planet tripled. This exotic phenomenon took place within a 40-million-year florescence of life, unlike any before or since known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, the biggest expansion of biodiversity in Earth’s history.
During the rise of mammals, following the Chicxulub impact (above) that ended the dinosaur epoch with the force of 300 million nuclear bombs, the planet’s temperatures spiked in a spooky way that the planet may experience again and soon. The planet’s leading climate scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, are predicting that Earth will soon reach a tipping point and that the human species we’ll need an escape plan, an insurance policy, a Planet B.
Think of beautiful blue planets with endless oceans orbiting many of the Milky Way’s one trillion stars. Could they support life? Perhaps even intelligent life? “There may be life there,” says Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But could it be technology-based like ours? Life on these worlds would be under water with no easy access to metals, to electricity, or fire for metallurgy. Maybe life’s inventiveness to get to a technology stage will surprise us.”
Like a story from a science fiction thriller, Antarctica’s long buried history has been revealed using data from the dead European Space Agency’s gravity mapping satellite, unveiling the remnants of ancient lost continents hidden deep beneath the continent’s ice.
Could one of Earth’s most intelligent species be an alien, ‘seeded’ on the planet by an interstellar genetic code? Scientists think the clue might be found in the ancient precursor to life, RNA.
