From the article on Svensmark : "Don't fret about the diehards. The glory of empirical science is this: no matter how many years, decades, or sometimes centuries it may take, in the end the story will come out right."-Dhw: Just one tiny problem here. Who can tell us for sure that it's "the end", and that the story has "come out right"?-MATT: YOU or I can't. It's only history that plays THAT one out. You and I are left with ideas and theories and have to decide for ourselves which ideas are sound.-Precisely. And as you and I are in no position to test the evidence or the soundness of the theories, and as history is one long succession of changing theories, I am advocating a degree of scepticism, in the sense of suspending judgement, at least until there is a general consensus among scientists themselves.-MATT: Which in the case of the general public is sad... but I've wanted to ask for some time why you do NOT consider yourself part of the masses?-This is a puzzling question. I don't know who you mean by "the masses". I don't consider myself part of the masses that believe in a god, I don't consider myself part of the masses that disbelieve in a god, I don't consider myself part of the masses that couldn't care less. I do consider myself part of the masses that have no answer to any of the fundamental questions we discuss on this forum, I do consider myself part of the masses that would love to know more about the universe we live in, but I also consider myself part of the masses that are bewildered by and sceptical of the string of different, often conflicting theories (both scientific and philosophical) purporting to explain the origin and nature of the universe and of life. I really don't understand your question, or why you ask it, although I feel uncomfortable about its possible insinuations. Perhaps you would explain it, and then tell us whether and why you do or don't consider yourself part of "the masses".

"The latest mystery revolves around an "extremely sharp" boundary at the inner edge of the outer belt at roughly 7,200 miles in altitude that appears to block the ultrafast electrons from breeching the shield and moving deeper towards Earth's atmosphere.-"It's almost like theses electrons are running into a glass wall in space," said Baker, the study's lead author. "Somewhat like the shields created by force fields on Star Trek that were used to repel alien weapons, we are seeing an invisible shield blocking these electrons. It's an extremely puzzling phenomenon."-"The team originally thought the highly charged electrons, which are looping around Earth at more than 100,000 miles per second, would slowly drift downward into the upper atmosphere and gradually be wiped out by interactions with air molecules. But the impenetrable barrier seen by the twin Van Allen belt spacecraft stops the electrons before they get that far, said Baker.-"The group looked at a number of scenarios that could create and maintain such a barrier. The team wondered if it might have to do with Earth's magnetic field lines, which trap and control protons and electrons, bouncing them between Earth's poles like beads on a string. The also looked at whether radio signals from human transmitters on Earth could be scattering the charged electrons at the barrier, preventing their downward motion. Neither explanation held scientific water, Baker said.-"Nature abhors strong gradients and generally finds ways to smooth them out, so we would expect some of the relativistic electrons to move inward and some outward," said Baker. "It's not obvious how the slow, gradual processes that should be involved in motion of these particles can conspire to create such a sharp, persistent boundary at this location in space.""-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141126133829.htm

Our Earth's surface is 2/3rds ocean. We still don't know where it came from or how:-http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30414519-But it sure is necessary to support life

Perhaps covered with water 3-4 billion years ago:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/ancient-earth-was-water-world?utm_campaign=news...

"Earth’s total surface water was always assumed to be constant. Now, evidence is mounting that some 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, the planet’s oceans held nearly twice as much water—enough to submerge today’s continents above the peak of Mount Everest. The flood could have primed the engine of plate tectonics and made it more difficult for life to start on land.

"Rocks in today’s mantle, the thick layer of rock beneath the crust, are thought to sequester an ocean’s worth of water or more in their mineral structures. But early in Earth’s history, the mantle, warmed by radioactivity, was four times hotter. Recent work using hydraulic presses has shown that many minerals would be unable to hold as much hydrogen and oxygen at mantle temperatures and pressures. “That suggests the water must have been somewhere else,” says Junjie Dong, a graduate student in mineral physics at Harvard University who led a model, based on those lab experiments, that was published today in AGU Advances. “And the most likely reservoir is the surface.”

***

"Two minerals found deep in the mantle store much of its water today: wadsleyite and ringwoodite, high-pressure variants of the volcanic mineral olivine. Rocks rich in those minerals make up 7% of the planet’s mass, and although only 2% of their weight is water today, “a little bit adds up to a lot,” says Steven Jacobsen, an experimental mineralogist at Northwestern University.

***

"Although the larger ocean would have made it harder for the continents to stick their necks out, it could explain why they appear to have been on the move early in Earth’s history, says Rebecca Fischer, an experimental petrologist at Harvard and co-author on the AGU Advances study. Larger oceans could have helped kick off plate tectonics as water penetrated fractures and weakened the crust, creating subduction zones where one slab of crust slipped below another. And once a subducting slab began its dive, the dryer, inherently stronger mantle would have helped bend the slab, ensuring its plunge would continue, says Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University. “If you cannot bend plates, you cannot have plate tectonics.”

"The evidence for larger oceans challenges scenarios for how life began on Earth, says Thomas Carell, a biochemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Some researchers believe it began at nutrient-rich hydrothermal vents in the ocean, whereas others favor shallow ponds on dry land, which would have frequently evaporated, creating a concentrated bath of chemicals.

"A larger ocean exacerbates the biggest strike against the underwater scenario: that the ocean itself would have diluted any nascent biomolecules to insignificance. But by drowning most land, it also complicates the thin pond scenario. Carell, a pond advocate, says in light of the new paper, he is now considering a different birthplace for life: sheltered, watery pockets within oceanic rocks that broke the surface in volcanic seamounts. “Maybe we had little caves in which it all happened,” he says.

"The ancient water world is also a reminder of how conditional Earth’s evolution is. The planet was likely parched until water-rich asteroids bombarded it shortly after its birth. If the asteroids had deposited twice as much water or the present day mantle had less appetite for water, then the continents, so essential for the planet’s life and climate, would never have emerged. “It’s a very delicate system, the Earth,” Dong says. “Too much water, or too little, and it wouldn’t work.” " (my bolds)

Comment: Our Earth is very special. Contingency says natural forces were at work, but not if God managed the transformations.

I'll present the bits and pieces which need no explanation, but the odds deny chance:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-science-based-origin-story-for-a-pl...

"During my lifetime—since the mid-20th century—we humans have suddenly become so powerful that what we do in the next 50 years will shape the future of all the species with which we share this planet. Whether we realize it or not, we have become the custodians of planet Earth.

"Those who are young today will have to learn how to grow into the new role of planetary custodians. But how do you do that? No species has ever played this role in the four billion years since life first appeared on our Earth (though groups of species, such as the first oxygen-producing organisms have transformed the biosphere).

***

"Those who are young today will have to learn how to grow into the new role of planetary custodians. But how do you do that? No species has ever played this role in the four billion years since life first appeared on our Earth (though groups of species, such as the first oxygen-producing organisms have transformed the biosphere).

***

"For millions of years the Earth was covered with ice during several so-called “snowball Earth” episodes. But volcanoes came to the rescue each time, by pumping up new supplies of greenhouse gases beneath ice sheets that covered the planet. And eventually, new oxygen-breathing organisms evolved and proliferated, creating a new atmospheric balance. Taken together, these mechanisms, and perhaps others that we do not yet understand, kept the Earth’s surface temperatures within the Goldilocks range for life, even as heat from the sun kept increasing.

***

"Within the protected temperature-controlled cocoon of the young Earth, life flourished and evolved, creating a huge variety of homes for living organisms in the planet’s oceans and seas. As oxygen levels increased with the spread of photosynthesizing plants, oxygen’s fierce chemical energy drove more extravagant and exotic forms of evolution. Multicellular life forms really began to flourish only in the last 600 million years, and only in the last 400 million years did large organisms begin to colonize the Earth’s continents, eventually greening large parts of their once rust-coloured landscapes, and filling the new jungles and savannas with the roars and screams of vast new creatures such as the dinosaurs.

"We humans are very much part of this story. Like all our mammalian relatives today, we flourished because of a cosmic accident that struck down most of the large reptiles that dominated the continents 65 million years ago.

***

"Humans evolved as part of this trend to larger brains. Relative to our body size, our brains are spectacularly big. But what really makes us humans different is some piece of rewiring in our brains that we don’t fully understand, which opened up entirely new forms of communication. We are different because we can tell each other stories, pass on new information, share jokes and even explain what we are feeling and imagining.

***

"We share so much information with such precision that information can accumulate, community by community, across many generations. We are the first species in four billion years that can accumulate information over many generations, through what we can call “collective learning.”

"And information, of course, is power. More information means a greater ability to manage our environments, to hunt or gather food, and to manipulate our surroundings. Over some 200,000 years, at a rate that was barely perceptible at first but has gradually accelerated, we learned more and more powerful ways of managing, exploiting and eventually transforming the landscapes, plants and animals around us. We share so much information with such precision that information can accumulate, community by community, across many generations. We are the first species in four billion years that can accumulate information over many generations, through what we can call “collective learning.” Today, this increasing ecological power explains why we are so populous, why we dominate all terrestrial environments and why, since discovering how to tap the colossal energy locked inside fossil fuels, we have begun to transform the Earth’s surface, its oceans, its atmosphere and the other species that share the planet with us."

Comment: The entire article shows all the seemingly chance events that led to the appearance of humans. These contingent events, carefully building upon one another carefully protected the evolving Earth to mature and protect the appearance of humans by removing any extreme events that might have killed the process.