Science thread - anything interesting?

Believe me, Earth's never going to "die". It's the life on the Earth that's perishable. And even if 100% of life on Earth is destroyed, it WILL come into existence again. Do you wanna know how? It's a bit technical, but after all that's what this thread is about so here we go -

When Earth was first formed from huge chunks of rocks due to the alleged Big Bang explosion, it was more like a huge ball of metals and silica with lighter parts like silica towards outside and the heavy metals like iron and nickel towards the core (central part) which was unimaginably hot (it is still even today). Due to this heat and pressure some of the compounds on the surfacepossibly got broken down to form gases like ammonia, hydrogen, methane etc and so the environment was reducing type. There was NO oxygen in the atmosphere itself, but scientists say it is possible that hydrogen and some of the oxygen that may have resulted from the breakdown of oxides on Earth's surface combined to form water vapour which rose into the air, cooled into water, rained down, evaporated on touching the hot surface, rose up and the same process repeated itself. Over millions of years' time, this process very, VERY slowly cooled down the Earth's surface somewhat.

And now, the liquid water settled in the Earth's cracks and shallows to form the primitive ocean. And as you might know, some gases like ammonia and HCl are highly soluble in water. They got dissolved in these oceans and, due to lightning from clouds (now that water vapour existed in the atmosphere also) there was formation of certain biomolecules like simple amino acids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids etc. This has been scientifically proved by Miller and Urey's famous experiment (check Wikepedia for details). So now these primitive compounds fell into the oceans, and came close together. It has been discovered that these compounds somewhat have an affinity to each other in certain conditions. So they combined together, with the protein (amino acid polymers) as sheath and nucleic acids as the core. This combination was known as coacervates, regarded as the first step towards living organisms on Earth. This gradually led to the evolution of chemoheterotrophic bacteria (which utilised the organic compounds on Earth to produce food) and gradually chemoautotrophic bacteria, which utilised the regular reducing gases in the primitive atmosphere to produce food. Then came the first primitive algae which actually began to use hydrogen sulphide and sunlight to photosynthesize and released oxygen into the air, slowly making the atmosphere into oxidising type as it is now, after millions of years. The organisms gradually adapted to this new environment, and thus began evolution, which contines even now. I guess the rest is clear

So you can see how nearly invincible is Earth itself - even if all life on it is destroyed, why cannot the above mentioned process begin again? It will take billions of years, yes, but what are billions of years to Earth? Only as much as a day is for us.


By polluting the atmosphere, destroying forests and harming wildlife, humans are not harming Earth at all, they're harming themselves. It is we who can perish from the aftermath of all this, not the Earth.