Privileged Planet: must have water (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, July 31, 2017, 18:29 (2673 days ago) @ David Turell

A new study suggests that a good supply of liquid water is a rare planetary attribute:

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-planets-hospitable-earth.html

"Scientists dealt a blow Monday to the quest for organisms inhabiting worlds besides Earth, saying our planet was unusual in its ability to host liquid water—the key ingredient for life.

"Jun Yang, of Peking University in China, and a team used climate models to simulate the evolution of icy planets.

"Without atmospheric greenhouse gases—a feature of Earth—the energy required to thaw an icy planet would be so high that it would transit from frozen to inferno without an intermediate, liveable phase, they found.

"We find that the stellar fluxes that are required to overcome a planet's initial snowball state are so large that they lead to significant water loss and preclude a habitable planet," the team wrote.

"Some icy bodies, they suggested, may therefore never pass through a habitable Earth-like state.

"Among these, Europa and Enceladus will likely morph from iceballs into fireballs by the time the Sun reaches it's super-hot red giant phase heat in billions of years from now, said the team.

"Earth was an example of an icy world that thawed just enough, some 600-800 million years ago, thanks to planet-warming atmospheric greenhouse gases emitted by volcanic eruptions during its snowball phase, the team said.

"This meant that less solar heat would have been required for the ice to melt, enabling our planet to achieve a temperate middle ground.

"Greenhouse gases, which are naturally present in the atmosphere but also released by humans burning coal, oil and gas, are what has kept our planet warm enough for humans, animals and plants to inhabit."

Comment: Our greenhouse gases are necessary for liquid water and for life. We are a very special planet; by design? We were once snowball Earth and then the gases accumulated.