The Evolutionary Path for Life on Earth

British spelling

Here are a few of my short-form stories, you may find them interesting and educational.

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We belong to a species called Homo sapiens, which has existed for an estimated 200,000 years.

Non-avian dinosaurs roamed the Earth for an estimated 165 million years. They died out around 65 million years ago, thought to be the result of a catastrophic asteroid strike on our planet.

You know what the human race has achieved, especially in the last few hundred years. We have even visited the moon.

Dinosaurs as a diverse group lived over 800 times longer than the human race, and as far as we know, they never achieved any more than eating, drinking, and reproducing.

So what confuses me is why dinosaurs never evolved to be more intelligent. I do believe in evolution, but that slow process works in a very complicated way.

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Could we be alone in the Universe?

Most of us go through our lives giving little thought to why we exist.

There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe; some of them will hold millions, and others will hold billions of stars.

Most of the stars will have various numbers of planets in orbit around them, and trillions of those planets will be in the Goldilocks zone.

The Goldilocks zone is an area in space with the perfect temperature for water to be in liquid form; no life on Earth can exist without water.

So the logical thing you might say is, “There must be other life out there in that vast area we call the universe”

Maybe some other intelligent life form living on a faraway world is asking the same question.

If we are alone, that would make us more special and unique than we could ever imagine.

We will probably never get a valid answer to that most important question: are we alone in the universe?

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Why do stars twinkle in the night sky?

The effect is called atmospheric scintillation.

Have you noticed that stars in the night sky twinkle?

You may also have noticed that the visible planets do not.

If you were looking at the stars from above the Earth’s atmosphere, they would not be twinkling; they only do so from our viewpoint on Earth.

The narrow beams of starlight passing through the Earth’s atmosphere can get distorted by temperature changes and different densities in the air; this is what causes the twinkling effect.

So why do the planets not twinkle?

Being a lot closer to the Earth means that the planets have a much broader beam of reflected light; therefore, the light is not being distorted so much as it travels through the atmosphere.

We only see a small number of stars as we gaze up at the night sky. The total number of stars in the universe is difficult for us to comprehend.

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Can science explain everything about the universe?

The simple answer to that question is no.

The human race has found out so many facts about how the universe has evolved since its creation 13.8 billion years ago.

We now know how stars form and evolve. Science can also explain in great detail the countless celestial objects that orbit our local star, the Sun.

The most fascinating objects in the universe are black holes; their density is mind-boggling, to say the least. But they are not fully understood; they keep their secrets hidden away, deep inside.

It can be frustrating when we don't get all the answers that we seek. Is the universe just a small part of a much larger structure?

We might have to content ourselves with the fact that we will never know everything about that gargantuan area called the universe.

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Between the stars.

Do you look up at the night sky in wonder?

As we gaze up at the stars on a clear night, they seem to be very close together, but that is not the case, it is an illusion. The space between most of the stars is vast.

Using our unaided vision, about 5,000 stars are visible from the surface of our planet, but the Earth itself gets in the way and restricts what we can see; therefore, we can only see about 2,500 stars from any viewpoint.

Proxima Centauri is the Sun’s closest star neighbour; it lies over 40 billion kilometres or 25 billion miles away. To make that statement easier to understand, imagine this:

The distance between the Earth and the Sun is almost 150 million kilometres or 93 million miles. Proxima Centauri is almost 269,000 astronomical units from the Sun.

One astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

The end

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You may find my easy-to-understand stories about the universe and life interesting and educational.

If you subscribe to me for free, you will see my latest stories. Regards.