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Milky Way Star Births May Have Influenced Life
eldavojohn writes "Space.com has an interesting article that speculates that the period when our galaxy was giving birth to stars resulted in huge fluctuations and impact on earth. From the article, 'Some 2.4 billion years ago when the Milky Way started upping its star production, cosmic rays — high-speed atomic particles — started pouring onto our planet, causing instability within the living. Populations of bacteria and algae repeatedly soared and crashed in the oceans.' Causes one to wonder what the probability for life arising on a planet is given that our own seemed to be in a very unique situation on many different counts."
The probability of life appearing on a planet may be high, and our planet's situation may not be as unique as you think. I study Planetary Science at the Open University (UK) and the fact that they decided to couple lessons about the search for life in the, primarily geology-themed, planetology course has to say a lot about what scientists think of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
It is, however, natural that some people think that Earth is unique, as it is the only living planet we know of. Sure, your first lemonade was unique, your first PC was unique, and your first GNU/Linux distro was also unique.