Rare Earth: How Vital Minerals “Evolve”

astrobiology, Astrobiology Magazine, biological activity, calcium, carbon, Carnegie Institute, chlorine, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, earth, elements, hydrogen, intelligence, Intelligent Design, magnesium, Mars, microbes, minerals, NASA, nitrogen, origin of life, oxygen, phosphorus, Physics, Earth & Space, potassium, Robert Hazen, selenium, Stephen Jay Gould, sulfur, The Privileged Planet, Titan, Washington State University
It's intriguing that life as we know it depends on a seemingly un-natural distribution of minerals. Source
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Jordan Peterson Springs the Trap of Scientism

Andrew Copson, beauty, Carl Jung, competence, Faith & Science, history of ideas, Holocaust, hydrogen, hydrogen bomb, Intelligent Design, Johannes Kepler, John Lennox, Jordan Peterson, Lawrence Krauss, leprosy, Michael Shermer, myths, Oxford Union, physicists, psychology, religion, Return of the God Hypothesis, Sam Harris, scientific method, scientific revolution, scientism, Stephen Meyer
There’s a gaping God-shaped hole in both Krauss and Peterson’s particular ways of spinning all this. Source
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Is Space Travel Our Destiny?

Abraham Loeb, atmosphere, BIO-Complexity, distance, Hubble Space Telescope, hydrogen, interstellar dust, interstellar ship, Mike Hippke, Milky Way, Neptune, oxidizers, oxygen, Physics, Earth & Space, Proxima Centauri, rockets, satellite TV, solar system, space travel, super-earths, The Privileged Planet, Tsiolkovsky equation, Uranus
A few days ago I published the paper “The Solar System: Favored for Space Travel” in the journal BIO-Complexity. I thought it would be helpful for me to give a short summary of the paper to Evolution News readers. I was motivated to do the study after two papers were published in 2018 on the difficulty of launching rockets from super-earths. Super-earths are the most common type of planet that are being discovered around exoplanets. They are somewhat loosely defined as being larger and more massive than Earth but smaller and less massive than Uranus or Neptune. From observations, super-earths seem to transition from rocky to gas-dominated composition above 1.5 times the size of Earth.  Two Studies Together, the two studies not only showed that it is more difficult to…
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