New study: formation of life-permitting elements carbon and oxygen is fine-tuned

First, let’s review the structure of the fine-tuning argument.

The argument goes like this:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe to support life is either due to law, chance or design
2. It is not due to law or chance
3. Therefore, the fine-tuning is due to design

Here are the facts on the fine-tuning:

• Life has certain minimal requirements; long-term stable source of energy, a large number of different chemical elements, an element that can serve as a hub for joining together other elements into compounds, a universal solvent, etc.
• In order to meet these minimal requirements, the physical constants, (such as the gravitational constant), and the ratios between physical constants, need to be withing a narrow range of values in order to support the minimal requirements for life of any kind.
• Slight changes to any of the physical constants, or to the ratios between the constants, will result in a universe inhospitable to life.
• The range of possible values spans 70 orders of magnitude.
• The constants are selected by whoever creates the universe. They are not determined by physical laws. And the extreme probabilities involved required put the fine-tuning beyond the reach of chance.
• Although each individual selection of constants and ratios is as unlikely as any other selection, the vast majority of these possibilities do not support the minimal requirements of life of any kind. (In the same way as any hand of 5 cards that is dealt is as likely as any other, but you are overwhelmingly likely NOT to get a royal flush. In our case, a royal flush is a life-permitting universe).

Carbon is that element that can serve as a hub, and oxygen is also a vital element, since it is a component of water, which is required for life. So both carbon (the hub of large molecules) and oxygen (a building block of water) are required for complex life of any imaginable kind.

Now for the new study.

Reader Jen who blogs at Victory Rolls and V8s sent me this amazing article on Science Daily about a new peer-reviewed study that supports the fine-tuning argument.

Here’s an excerpt:

Life as we know it is based upon the elements of carbon and oxygen. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, is looking at the conditions necessary to the formation of those two elements in the universe. They’ve found that when it comes to supporting life, the universe leaves very little margin for error.

Both carbon and oxygen are produced when helium burns inside of giant red stars. Carbon-12, an essential element we’re all made of, can only form when three alpha particles, or helium-4 nuclei, combine in a very specific way. The key to formation is an excited state of carbon-12 known as the Hoyle state, and it has a very specific energy — measured at 379 keV (or 379,000 electron volts) above the energy of three alpha particles. Oxygen is produced by the combination of another alpha particle and carbon.

NC State physicist Dean Lee and German colleagues Evgeny Epelbaum, Hermann Krebs, Timo Laehde and Ulf-G. Meissner had previously confirmed the existence and structure of the Hoyle state with a numerical lattice that allowed the researchers to simulate how protons and neutrons interact. These protons and neutrons are made up of elementary particles called quarks. The light quark mass is one of the fundamental parameters of nature, and this mass affects particles’ energies.

In new lattice calculations done at the Juelich Supercomputer Centre the physicists found that just a slight variation in the light quark mass will change the energy of the Hoyle state, and this in turn would affect the production of carbon and oxygen in such a way that life as we know it wouldn’t exist.

[...]The researchers’ findings appear in Physical Review Letters.

So that’s the latest research that supports the fine-tuning argument. But how effective is this argument really? Is it only admitted by theists, or do atheists accept the fine-tuning as well?

Is the fine-tuning real?

Yes, it’s real and it is conceded by the top-rank of atheist physicists. Let me give you a citation from the best one of all, Martin Rees. Martin Rees is an atheist and a qualified astronomer. He wrote a book called “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe”, (Basic Books: 2001). In it, he discusses 6 numbers that need to be fine-tuned in order to have a life-permitting universe.

Rees writes here:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?

There are some atheists who deny the fine-tuning, but these atheists are in firm opposition to the progress of science. The more science has progressed, the more constants, ratios and quantities we have discovered that need to be fine-tuned. Science is going in a theistic direction. Next, let’s see how atheists try to account for the fine-tuning, on atheism.

Atheistic responses to the fine-tuning argument

There are two common responses among atheists to this argument.

The first is to speculate that there are actually an infinite number of other universes that are not fine-tuned, (i.e. – the gambler’s fallacy). All these other universes don’t support life. We just happen to be in the one universe is fine-tuned for life. The problem is that there is no way of directly observing these other universes and no independent evidence that they exist.

Here is an excerpt from an article in Discover magazine, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).

Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

The second response by atheists is that the human observers that exist today, 14 billion years after the universe was created out of nothing, actually caused the fine-tuning. This solution would mean that although humans did not exist at the time the of the big bang, they are going to be able to reach back in time at some point in the future and manually fine-tune the universe.

Here is an excerpt from and article in the New Scientist, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).

…maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation… observers are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.

So, there are two choices for atheists. Either an infinite number of unobservable universes that are not fine-tuned, or humans go back in time at some future point and fine-tune the beginning of the universe, billions of years in the past.

Why the fine-tuning argument matters

We need to make a decision today about how we are going to live. The evidence available today supports the fine-tuning of the universe by a supernatural mind with immense power. The progress of science has strengthened this theory against determined opposition from rival naturalistic theories.

Those are the facts, and we must all choose what to do with them.

Further study

Here is a paper by Walter L. Bradley that contains many more examples of the fine-tuning, and explanations for what happens when you change the constants, quantities and rations even slightly.

Filed under: Polemics, Aliens, Amino Acid, Apologetics, Atheism, Carbon, Carbon-based Life, Chance, Complex Life, Constants, Cosmological Constants, Cosmology, Design, Fine Tuning, Habitability, Intelligent Design, Life, Liquid Water, Oxygen, Physical Laws, Physics, Probability Theory, Progress of Science, Protein, Solvent, Universal Solvent, Water

New paper finds that mass of asteroid belts affect habitability of planets

Science Daily reports. (H/T Evolution News via ECM)

Excerpt:

They suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun’s protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet.

This might sound surprising because asteroids are considered a nuisance due to their potential to impact Earth and trigger mass extinctions. But an emerging view proposes that asteroid collisions with planets may provide a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life.

Asteroids may have delivered water and organic compounds to the early Earth. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, occasional asteroid impacts might accelerate the rate of biological evolution by disrupting a planet’s environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies.

The astronomers based their conclusion on an analysis of theoretical models and archival observations of extrasolar Jupiter-sized planets and debris disks around young stars. “Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet,” said Martin, the study’s lead author. “Our study suggests that our solar system may be rather special.”

There’s a long list of factors that have to be present for a planet to support life – and more keep appearing every day. Here’s another recent one from the journal Nature.

Related posts

• Three ways that the progress of science conflicts with naturalistic speculations
• What conditions support the minimum requirements for complex life?
• Guillermo Gonzalez lectures at UC Davis on the requirements for life
• Does the progress of science lead to theism or atheism?
• Walter Bradley explains three scientific arguments for God’s existence
• Brian Auten interviews Jay Richards about Christian apologetics
• Harvard astrophysicist backs the Rare Earth hypothesis

Filed under: News, Aliens, Are We Alone, Astrobiology, Carbon, Carbon-based Life, CHZ, Circumstellar Habitable Zone, Class M Planet, Copernican Principle, Cosmology, Exoplanet, Galactic Habitable Zone, GHZ, Habitability, Intelligent Design, Main Sequence Star, Moon, Orbit, Oxygen Atmosphere, Planetary Rotation, Rare Earth, Star Formation, Star Trek, Terrestrial Planet, The Privileged Planet, Tilt, Universal Solvent

What conditions support the minimum requirements for complex life?

You need to have a certain amount of elemental diversity to support the minimal requirements of living systems. For example, you need carbon, hence “carbon-based life”.

The Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ)

Human bodies are made of carbon, and many other heavy elements. You need many different heavy elements in order to make up your physical body. Our star, the Sun, is also made of heavy elements. You also need heavy elements in order to crate a metal-rich star like our Sun. A heavy metal-rich star is required in order to support complex carbon-based life in any solar system. The metal-rich star is required because you need to make sure that it can burn stably for a LONG period of time. A metal-rich star also allows you to have a habitable planet far enough from that metal-rich star so that the planet can support liquid water on the planet’s surface. The zone where a planet can have liquid water at the surface is called the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ). A solar system is therefore a lot like a campfire – you can’t get too close or you get set on fire, and you can’t get too far or you freeze to death. With planets, you need to keep away so your water doesn’t evaporate from the surface, but not so far away that your water freezes. Liquid water on the surface is needed in order to act as a universal solvent in the chemistry of life.

Circumstellar Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 4 of 12, full playlist here)

A metal-rich star like the Sun is very massive, which allows planets to stay in orbit much further away. Notice that the smaller the star, the closer you have to go to the star. If you go too close to the star then your planet is “tidally locked” – your planet no longer spins on it’s axis – and that’s very bad for life)

The Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ)

So, where do you get the heavy elements you need for your heavy metal-rich star?

You have to get the heavy elements for your star from supernova explosions – explosions that occur when certain stars die. That’s where heavy elements come from. But you can’t be TOO CLOSE to the dying stars, because you will get hit by nasty radiation and explosions. So to get the heavy elements, your solar system needs to be in the galactic habitable zone (GHZ) – the zone where you can pickup the heavy elements you need but not get hit by radiation and explosions. The GHZ lies between the spiral arms of a spiral galaxy. You can be too close to the center of the galaxy, it’s too dense there and you will get hit with massive radiation that will break down your life chemistry. And you can’t be to far from the center, because you won’t get enough heavy elements from the lower number of dying stars in the spiral arms.

Galactic Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 10 of 12, full playlist here)

The GHZ is based on a discovery made by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, which made the front cover of Scientific American in 2001. That’s right, the cover of Scientific American. That’s when this was discovered.

By the way, you can watch a lecture with Guillermo Gonzalez explaining his ideas further. The lecture was delivered at UC Davis in 2007. That link has a link to the playlist of the lecture, a bio of the speaker, and a summary of all the topics he discussed in the lecture. An excellent place to learn the requirements for a suitable habitat for life. The GHZ and CHZ are ONLY TWO of the requirements for a habitat for life – there are a lot more requirements! Once you list them all out, the odds of getting even one place that is suitable are quite low. If you like this sort of evidence, I recommend the DVD of “The Privileged Planet”, which you can get on Amazon. Or just watch it for free on YouTube.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument

Filed under: Polemics, Aliens, Apologetics, Are We Alone, Astrobiology, Carbon, Carbon-based Life, CHZ, Circumstellar Habitable Zone, Class M Planet, Copernican Principle, Cosmology, Exoplanet, Galactic Habitable Zone, GHZ, Guillermo Gonzalez, Habitability, Intelligent Design, Jay Richards, Main Sequence Star, Moon, Orbit, Oxygen Atmosphere, Planetary Rotation, Rare Earth, Star Formation, Star Trek, Terrestrial Planet, The Privileged Planet, Tilt, Universal Solvent

What conditions support the minimum requirements for complex life?

You need to have a certain amount of elemental diversity to support the minimal requirements of living systems. For example, you need carbon, hence “carbon-based life”.

The Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ)

Human bodies are made of carbon, and many other heavy elements. You need many different heavy elements in order to make up your physical body. Our star, the Sun, is also made of heavy elements. You also need heavy elements in order to crate a metal-rich star like our Sun. A heavy metal-rich star is required in order to support complex carbon-based life in any solar system. The metal-rich star is required because you need to make sure that it can burn stably for a LONG period of time. A metal-rich star also allows you to have a habitable planet far enough from that metal-rich star so that the planet can support liquid water on the planet’s surface. The zone where a planet can have liquid water at the surface is called the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ). A solar system is therefore a lot like a campfire – you can’t get too close or you get set on fire, and you can’t get too far or you freeze to death. With planets, you need to keep away so your water doesn’t evaporate from the surface, but not so far away that your water freezes. Liquid water on the surface is needed in order to act as a universal solvent in the chemistry of life.

Circumstellar Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 4 of 12, full playlist here)

A metal-rich star like the Sun is very massive, which allows planets to stay in orbit much further away. Notice that the smaller the star, the closer you have to go to the star. If you go too close to the star then your planet is “tidally locked” – your planet no longer spins on it’s axis – and that’s very bad for life)

The Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ)

So, where do you get the heavy elements you need for your heavy metal-rich star?

You have to get the heavy elements for your star from supernova explosions – explosions that occur when certain stars die. That’s where heavy elements come from. But you can’t be TOO CLOSE to the dying stars, because you will get hit by nasty radiation and explosions. So to get the heavy elements, your solar system needs to be in the galactic habitable zone (GHZ) – the zone where you can pickup the heavy elements you need but not get hit by radiation and explosions. The GHZ lies between the spiral arms of a spiral galaxy. You can be too close to the center of the galaxy, it’s too dense there and you will get hit with massive radiation that will break down your life chemistry. And you can’t be to far from the center, because you won’t get enough heavy elements from the lower number of dying stars in the spiral arms.

Galactic Habitable Zone

Here, watch a clip from The Privileged Planet: (Clip 10 of 12, full playlist here)

The GHZ is based on a discovery made by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, which made the front cover of Scientific American in 2001. That’s right, the cover of Scientific American. That’s when this was discovered.

By the way, you can watch a lecture with Guillermo Gonzalez explaining his ideas further. The lecture was delivered at UC Davis in 2007. That link has a link to the playlist of the lecture, a bio of the speaker, and a summary of all the topics he discussed in the lecture. An excellent place to learn the requirements for a suitable habitat for life. The GHZ and CHZ are ONLY TWO of the requirements for a habitat for life – there are a lot more requirements! Once you list them all out, the odds of getting even one place that is suitable are quite low. If you like this sort of evidence, I recommend the DVD of “The Privileged Planet”, which you can get on Amazon. Or just watch it for free on YouTube.

Related posts

• The origin of the universe from nothing
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to permit life
• The fine-tuning of the galaxy, solar system, and planet to permit life
• Origin of the building blocks in the simplest replicating cell
• Origin of biological information in the simplest replicating cell
• Sudden origins of all major body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The limits on what natural selection and random mutation can do
• Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion
• Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?

Filed under: Polemics, Aliens, Apologetics, Are We Alone, Astrobiology, Carbon, Carbon-based Life, CHZ, Circumstellar Habitable Zone, Class M Planet, Copernican Principle, Cosmology, Exoplanet, Galactic Habitable Zone, GHZ, Guillermo Gonzalez, Habitability, Intelligent Design, Jay Richards, Main Sequence Star, Moon, Orbit, Oxygen Atmosphere, Planetary Rotation, Rare Earth, Star Formation, Star Trek, Terrestrial Planet, The Privileged Planet, Tilt, Universal Solvent

What conditions are needed to create a habitable planet?

UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from Post-Darwinist! Thanks for the link Denyse! New visitors may be interested in this post, which is a jumping off point for all of posts on science and faith issues.

Everyone who isn’t Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins already knows about the standard fine-tuning argument. But have you ever considered what it takes to make a planet that is capable of supporting the minimal requirements of living systems? The area of science that specializes in answering this question is called astrobiology. Let’s take a look!

I will be working from a lecture (with Q&A) delivered in October 2007 at California State University – Fresno, by two of my favorite scholars, Jay Wesley Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez.

The Copernican Principle

Richards introduces the idea of the Copernican Principle. This principle states that the progress of science will show that there is nothing special (designed) about man’s place in the universe.

The minimal requirements for life

I’ve written about this before here, but basically life requires a minimum amount of encoded biological information to allow it to replicate itself. The only element in the periodic table that allows you to encode information is carbon. Carbon is the hub of large molecules which form the paper and text of biological information. No carbon = no life.

Secondly, you need some environment in which to form molecules around the carbon, such as amino acids and proteins. That environment is liquid water. And you need the liquid water to be at the surface the planet where you want life to exist.

The requirements of a habitable planet

Here are just a few of the requirements mentioned in the lecture.

• a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
• a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
• the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
• the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
• a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
• plate tectonics
• an oxygen-rich atmosphere
• a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
• planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits

Note that these requirements are connected. If you mess with one, some of the others will be thrown out of tune. For more habitability requirements, see this article by Gonzalez and Richards.

What are the probabilities that we will get these conditions?

Richards explains that the question of whether this is designed is like winning the lottery. Your chance of winning depends on two things:

1. the odds of getting all the conditions correct
2. the number of tries that you get

If the odds of winning are 1 in a million, you could still win by buying a million tickets with all the different numbers. In the universe, there are only about 10^22 possible solar systems. So if the odds of getting a habitable planet are 1 in 10^9, you’ll get tons of life. But what if the odds are 1 in 10^40? Then you’re not likely to win.

But this is not the argument that these two are making, because even though there are a lot of factors needed for a habitable planet, we still can’t say for certain how likely it is that each of these conditions will obtain. Therefore, we can’t make the argument except by estimating the odds of getting each condition.

Although you could use very generous estimates, it would still be guessing, and you can win a debate by guessing. So are we stuck?

How to make a design argument using habitability

Gonzalez explains why you can still make an argument for design by arguing that the coorelation between habitability and measurabiliy is intentional. (By measurability, he really means the ease of making scientific discoveries). And you do this by correlating the conditions for sustaining life with the conditions for allowing scientific discoveries.

Gonzalez gives two examples:

1. Solar eclipses require that the sun and moon have certain sizes and certain distances from the sun. The surface of the Earth is the optimal location in our solar system for observing solar eclipses. We were able to make many valuable discoveries due to this fine-tuning, not the least of which was confirming the theory of general relativity, which was cruicial to the science of cosmology.
2. The location of our solar system is fine-tuned within two spiral arms of a spiral galaxy. We escape from radiation and other dangers, but to also allow use to capture heavy elements that are needed to make a suitable Sun and humans bodies, too. But the same conditions that allow life also allow us to make scientific discoveries, such as star formation theory and cosmic microwave background radiation measurements, which was needed in order to confirm the creation of the universe out of nothing (the big bang).

Spooky. And what until they list off a half-dozen more examples in their book “The Privileged Planet”. It’s downright terrifying!

Conclusion

Richards sums up the argument with an illustration. He asks why scientists construct observatories high up on mountains. The answer is in order to avoid “light pollution” from nearby cities, which ruin the ability of scientists to observe the stars and make discoveries. And this is what we see with our planet and solar system. No one builds a planet that can be used to make scientific discoveries in a place that doesn’t support life. It turns out that the very places in the universe that are good for making observations are also the best places for supporting life.

Further study

I would recommend checking out the documentary DVD, if you find the book too scary. There is also a university lecture DVD with both authors, filmed at Biola University. If you want to see the DVD online for FREE, then click here (narrated by John-Rhys Davies). Awesome! Go science!

Filed under: Polemics, Aliens, Apologetics, Are We Alone, Astrobiology, Carbon, Carbon-based Life, CHZ, Circumstellar Habitable Zone, Class M Planet, Copernican Principle, Cosmology, Exoplanet, Galactic Habitable Zone, GHZ, Guillermo Gonzalez, Habitability, Intelligent Design, Jay Richards, Main Sequence Star, Moon, Orbit, Oxygen Atmosphere, Planetary Rotation, Rare Earth, Star Formation, Star Trek, Terrestrial Planet, The Privileged Planet, Tilt, Universal Solvent