Introduction
Imagine in an empty vacuum of space where not many organisms can live. There is a massive rock which thrives with life – orbiting a massive hot ball of gas. This is what you would call a planet and we live on one! The Earth is approximately 4.543 billion years old and our own species is 300,00 years old.
How the sun is important for life
If you have ever wondered how the planet we now stand on had formed in our solar system, I’m going to inform you how our home planet formed. First in order to be a planet there has to be a star (and a star forms when gas and particles start to form together due to gravity of a large gas cloud in space). With the formation of the sun, the remaining gas and dust flattened into a rotating protoplanetary disk. Within this swirling debris, rocky particles began to collide, forming larger masses that soon attracted even more particles due to gravity. These particles contracted under gravity to create planetesimals, which collided with one another to become the solid inner planets.
The “Goldilocks zone”
The planetesimals also need to be in a specific spot where its not too cold for water to freeze or too hot for water to evaporate, this part of the early solar system is called the “Goldilocks zone.” The Goldilocks zone is important to have so water form on a planet’s surface (water can slowly start to form when asteroids smash into the Earth. These asteroids can carry ice crystals which will eventually melt forming water).
Evolution from microorganism to mammals
Eventually water will fill up parts of the planet and vegetation will start to grow, the sea will have microscopic life which will eventually evolve into bigger life, and these organisms will eventually become dolphins and whales. Some of the life will make it onto the land, evolution will continue to happen, and these organisms will eventually grow into mammals like monkeys and chimpanzees.
These mammals will eventually evolve into different species including our own, “Humans.” We are mammals and throughout the millions of years we have evolved and grew more intelligent as the time passed.
Sources:
How water had ended up on earth / theories how water ended up on earth
