If Mars had simply pulled itself up by its boostraps instead of wallowing in self-pity, it too could have been a giant. Especially as close to the asteroid belt as it is, there's really no excuse. Planets need to start taking responsibility for their failures instead of looking for handouts.
Make Solar System Great Again!
There's a theory I heard somewhere, that the giant planets also played a vital role in the development of life on earth. Basically their gigantic gravity well acts like cosmic hoover sucking in all the flotsam and jetsam that's constantly flying here and there. Where it not for this Earth would otherwise be continuously bombarded with all these as meteors making the development of life impossible.
I suppose that means that in our search for potentially life-supporting exoplanets, we ought to place a higher priority on systems with large outer planets.
I don't know. I think we should gather as much data as possible without looking for conditions similar to earth. We have no idea how life can develop.
have you ever spent a lot of time sifting through any non-trivially large set of data looking for a pattern. Sometimes you need precepts to help you narrow your scope of attention. Like, when you go to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, the surest way of finding the needle is to take a "bottom up" approach and sift the entire haystack. Or, you could use your knowledge of where you last saw the needle and do a rough search there. Or in the hope that the needle is the right kind of metal you might try using a magnet. Each of these might prove fruitless if your assumptions don't hold but they have a high probability vs their cost.
I don't think that's true. Jupiter is just as likely to sling objects that were going to miss earth directly towards earth as it is to sling a directed to earth object away. For objects that end up landing on Jupiter, if you think that has a significant impact on Earth, you're underestimating how huge and empty the solar system is.
Seeing that little "Life timeline" chart on the right has got me wishing for a time lapse of that evolution. Would be truly amazing to see that...
There are multiple theories on how planets could have been migrated in/out or they came into existence in our solar system. But the problem is this cannot be reverse engineered and verified because early on when solar system was getting formed even small disturbances, interactions or flyby of foreign planets or objects could have altered by course of history without leaving any trace.