Is The Earth In The Wrong Place In The Galaxy?
By now we have no doubt. We are not at the center of the solar system, nor are we at the center of our galaxy… Much less are we at the center of the universe…
One step back at a time, we have finally realized that our planet is just one of many, among billions of billions of others.
Sure, a lucky planet, it seems… favored by exceptional cosmic coincidences…
But are we really sure? For example, are we really sure that the position where the Solar System was formed in the Milky Way is just the absolute best? Could we have found better? Could we have found worse?
Agreed, we are not in a “privileged” position in the universe. But perhaps the fact that we are not is in itself a special thing. Who knows?
But we are not here to philosophize… Our purpose is to try to understand whether Earth’s position in the Milky Way may have positively or negatively affected its own development.
We all know that what we call the Milky Way is nothing more than the galaxy that houses our planetary system. In this case, it is a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years in diameter (just to understand what a boundless size we are talking about, one light-year is equivalent to about 63,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). Its basic structure consists of a stellar component compressed into a disk about 1,500 light-years thick–a disk filled with hundreds of billions of stars, dust, and gas, mostly arranged in irregular spiral arms. Globular clusters surround the disk in a spherical swarm concentrated toward the center of the disk
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