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Rare Earth:
Why Complex Life is
Uncommon in the Universe
Peter D. Ward
Donald Brownlee
COPERNICUS BOOKS
ward_FM_i-xxviii 3/10/03 14:01 Page i
“A pleasure for the rational reader . . . what good books are all about . . . ”
—Associated Press
“If Ward and Brownlee are right it could be time to reverse a process that has been
going on since Copernicus.”
—The Times (London)
“Although simple life is probably abundant in the universe, Ward & Brownlee say,
‘complex life—animals and higher plants—is likely to be far more rare than is
commonly assumed’.”
—Scientific American, Editor’s Choice
“[Rare Earth] has hit the world of astrobiologists like a killer asteroid . . . .”
—Newsday
The notion that life existed anywhere in the universe besides Earth was once
laughable in the scientific community. Over the past thirty years or so, the laugh-
ter has died away . . . . [Ward and Brownlee] argue that the recent trend in scien-
tific thought has gone too far . . . . As radio telescopes sweep the skies and earth-
bound researchers strain to pick up anything that might be a signal from
extraterrestrial beings, Rare Earth may offer an explanation for why we haven’t
heard anything yet.”
—CNN.com
“Movies and television give the (optimistic) impression that the cosmos is teeming
with civilizations. But what if it isn’t? . . . Life elsewhere in the universe may never
reach beyond microbes, which, the authors note, could be much more widespread
than originally believed.”
—Sky & Telescope
“It’s brilliant . . . courageous. . . . It’s rare in literature and science that a stance goes
so far against the grain.”
—Dr. Geoffrey W. Marcy
Extra-solar planet discoverer
University of California at Berkeley
“It’s a thought that grips most everyone who stares into the unfathomable depths of
a star-speckled night: Is there anybody out there? The odds, say Peter Ward and
Don Brownlee, are probably more remote than you think.”
—The Seattle Times
“Alien life is more likely to resemble the stuff you scrub off the tiles in your shower
than Klingons, Wookies or Romulans, say Ward and Brownlee.”
—Popular Mechanics
“Ward and Brownlee have taken an issue that is much in the public domain and
treated it thoughtfully and thoroughly, but with a lightness of touch that draws
the reader on . . . . Rare Earth is an excellent book for both specialists and non-
specialists.”
—The Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)
“Rare Earth will surely appeal to those who would dare to disagree with icons Carl
Sagan and George Lucas.”
—San Gabriel Valley Tribune
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“In this encouraging and superbly written book, the authors present a carefully rea-
soned and scientifically statute examination of the age-old question—‘Are we alone
in the universe?’ Their astonishing conclusion that even simple animal life is most
likely extremely rare in the universe has many profound implications. To the aver-
age person, staring up at a dark night sky, full of distant galaxies, it is simply incon-
ceivable that we are alone. Yet, in spite of our wishful thinking, there just may not
be other Mozarts or Monets.”
—Don Johanson
Director, Institute of Human Origins
Arizona State University
“Ward and Brownlee take us on a fascinating journey through the deep history of
our habitable planet and out into space; in the process they weave a compelling ar-
gument that life at the level of an animal should be vastly rarer in the universe than
life at the level of a lowly bacterium.”
—Steven M. Stanley,
Author of Children of the Ice Age and Earth and Life Through Time
The Johns Hopkins University
“Microbial life is common in the universe, but multicellular animal life is rare. A
controversial thesis, but one that is well-researched and well-defended. A must-read
for anyone who is interested in whether life exists beyond Earth.”
—James Kasting
Pennsylvania State University
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Rafted ice covering the subterranean ocean of Europa (moon of planet Jupiter), a possible life habitat in
the outer solar system. NASA image from the Galileo spacecraft. Courtesy of NASA.
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RARE
EARTH
Why
Complex Life
Is Uncommon in
the Universe
Peter D. Ward
Donald Brownlee
COPERNICUS BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF SPRINGER-VERLAG
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Copernicus Books
37 East 7th Street
New York, NY 10003
www.copernicusbooks.com
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of
Gene Shoemaker
and
Carl Sagan
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Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition ........................................................................ x
Preface to the First Edition.............................................................................. xiii
Introduction: The Astrobiology Revolution and the Rare Earth Hypothesis ... xvii
Dead Zones of the Universe ........................................................................ xxix
Rare Earth Factors .................................................................................... xxxi
ix
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Preface to the
Paperback Edition
O
n November 12, 2002, Dr. John Chambers of the NASA Ames Re-
search Center gave a seminar to the Astrobiology Group at the
University of Washington. The audience of about 100 listened
with rapt attention as Chambers described results from a computer study of
how planetary systems form. The goal of his research was to answer a decep-
tively simple question: How often would newly forming planetary systems
produce Earth-like planets, given a star the size of our own sun? By “Earth-
like” Chambers meant a rocky planet with water on its surface, orbiting
within a star’s “habitable zone.” This not-too-hot and not-too-cold inner re-
gion, relatively close to the star, supports the presence of liquid water on a
planet surface for hundreds of million of years—the time-span probably nec-
essary for the evolution of life. To answer the question of just how many
Earth-like planets might be spawned in such a planetary system, Chambers
had spent thousands of hours running highly sophisticated modeling pro-
grams through arrays of powerful computers.
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R A R E E A R T H
There was one other aspect of the lecture that struck us. Chambers matter-of-
factly spoke of the necessity of planets having plate tectonics to be habitable,
and of the effect of mass extinctions. We know that plate tectonics provides a
method of maintaining some sort of planetary thermostat that keeps planets at a
constant temperature for billions of years. We know, too, that mass extinctions
can end life on a planet abruptly, at any time, and that the number of mass ex-
tinctions might be linked to astronomical factors, such as the position of a planet
in its galaxy. Prior to the publication of the first edition of Rare Earth in January
2000, neither of these concepts had publicly appeared in discussions of planetary
habitability. Now they do, as a matter of course, and this has been a great satisfac-
tion to us. Our hypothesis that bacteria-like life might be quite common in the
Universe, but complex life quite rare, may or may not be correct. But the fact that
we’ve been able to bring new lines of evidence into the debate, evidence that was
once controversial but is now quite mainstream, has been extremely gratifying.
With its initial publication, Rare Earth struck chords among a wide commu-
nity. Because it took a rather novel position about the frequency of complex life,
the discussion spurred by the book often left the realm of scientific discourse,
where we’d intended it to take place, and entered the arenas of religion, ethics,
and science fiction. Science has progressed since the publication, yet nothing we
have read or discovered in the years since has caused us to change our minds.
One of the most remarkable developments has been the continual discovery of
new planets orbiting other stars (the count is now over 100). While this shows
that planets are common, it also shows how complex and varied planetary sys-
tems are, and how difficult it is to make a stable Earth-like planet. Most of the
extra-solar planets that have been discovered are giant planets in orbits that pre-
clude the possibility of water-covered Earths with long-term stability.
This edition, then, is changed only in the removal of several egregious
and sometimes hilarious typos and errors. We stand by our initial assessment
and are proud to see that Rare Earth continues to spawn heated debate even as
it makes its way into textbooks as accepted dogma.
xii
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Preface to the
First Edition
T Washington faculty club, and then it simply took off. It was stimulated
by a host of discoveries suggesting to us that complex life is less perva-
sive in the Universe than is now commonly assumed. In our discussions, it be-
came clear that both of us believed such life is not widespread, and we de-
cided to write a book explaining why.
Of course, we cannot prove that the equivalent of our planet’s animal
life is rare elsewhere in the Universe. Proof is a rarity in science. Our argu-
ments are post hoc in the sense that we have examined Earth history and then
tried to arrive at generalizations from what we have seen here. We are clearly
bound by what has been called the Weak Anthropic Principle—that we, as
observers in the solar system, have a strong bias in identifying habitats or fac-
tors leading to our own existence. To put it another way, it is very difficult to
do statistics with an N of 1. But in our defense, we have staked out a position
rarely articulated but increasingly accepted by many astrobiologists. We
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R A R E E A R T H
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xv
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Introduction:
The Astrobiology
Revolution and the
Rare Earth Hypothesis
n any given night, a vast array of extraterrestrial organisms fre-
O quent the television sets and movie screens of the world. From Star
Wars and “Star Trek” to The X-Files, the message is clear: The Uni-
verse is replete with alien life forms that vary widely in body plan, intelli-
gence, and degree of benevolence. Our society is clearly enamored of the ex-
pectation not only that there is life on other planets, but that incidences of
intelligent life, including other civilizations, occur in large numbers in the Uni-
verse.
This bias toward the existence elsewhere of intelligent life stems partly
from wishing (or perhaps fearing) it to be so and partly from a now-famous
publication by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, who devised an es-
timate (called the Drake Equation) of the number of advanced civilizations
that might be present in our galaxy. This formula was based on educated
guesses about the number of planets in the galaxy, the percentage of those
that might harbor life, and the percentage of planets on which life not only
xvii
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R A R E E A R T H
could exist but could have advanced to exhibit culture. Using the best avail-
able estimates at the time, Drake and Sagan arrived at a startling conclusion:
Intelligent life should be common and widespread throughout the galaxy. In
fact, Carl Sagan estimated in 1974 that a million civilizations may exist in our
Milky Way galaxy alone. Given that our galaxy is but one of hundreds of bil-
lions of galaxies in the Universe, the number of intelligent alien species
would then be enormous.
The idea of a million civilizations of intelligent creatures in our galaxy
is a breathtaking concept. But is it credible? The solution to the Drake Equa-
tion includes hidden assumptions that need to be examined. Most important,
it assumes that once life originates on a planet, it evolves toward ever higher
complexity, culminating on many planets in the development of culture.
That is certainly what happened on our Earth. Life originated here about 4
billion years ago and then evolved from single-celled organisms to multicel-
lular creatures with tissues and organs, climaxing in animals and higher
plants. Is this particular history of life—one of increasing complexity to an
animal grade of evolution—an inevitable result of evolution, or even a com-
mon one? Might it, in fact, be a very rare result?
In this book we will argue that not only intelligent life, but even the
simplest of animal life, is exceedingly rare in our galaxy and in the Universe.
We are not saying that life is rare—only that animal life is. We believe that life
in the form of microbes or their equivalents is very common in the universe,
perhaps more common than even Drake and Sagan envisioned. However,
complex life—animals and higher plants—is likely to be far more rare than is
commonly assumed. We combine these two predictions of the commonness
of simple life and the rarity of complex life into what we will call the Rare
Earth Hypothesis. In the pages ahead we explain the reasoning behind this
hypothesis, show how it may be tested, and suggest what, if it is accurate, it
may mean to our culture.
The search in earnest for extraterrestrial life is only beginning, but we
have already entered a remarkable period of discovery, a time of excitement
and dawning knowledge perhaps not seen since Europeans reached the New
World in their wooden sailing ships. We too are reaching new worlds and are
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Introduction
acquiring data at an astonishing pace. Old ideas are crumbling. New views
rise and fall with each new satellite image or deep-space result. Each novel bi-
ological or paleontological discovery supports or undermines some of the
myriad hypotheses concerning life in the Universe. It is an extraordinary
time, and a whole new science is emerging: astrobiology, whose central focus
is the condition of life in the Universe. The practitioners of this new field are
young and old, and they come from diverse scientific backgrounds. Feverish
urgency is readily apparent on their faces at press conferences, such as those
held after the Mars Pathfinder experiments, the discovery of a Martian mete-
orite on the icefields of Antarctica, and the collection of new images from
Jupiter’s moons. In usually decorous scientific meetings, emotions boil over,
reputations are made or tarnished, and hopes ride a roller coaster, for scien-
tific paradigms are being advanced and discarded with dizzying speed. We
are witnesses to a scientific revolution, and as in any revolution there will be
winners and losers—both among ideas and among partisans. It is very much
like the early 1950s, when DNA was discovered, or the 1960s, when the con-
cept of plate tectonics and continental drift was defined. Both of these events
prompted revolutions in science, not only leading to the complete reorgani-
zation of their immediate fields and to adjustments in many related fields, but
also spilling beyond the boundaries of science to make us look at ourselves
and our world in new ways. That will come to pass as well in this newest sci-
entific revolution, the Astrobiology Revolution of the 1990s and beyond.
What makes this revolution so startling is that it is happening not within a
given discipline of science, such as biology in the 1950s or geology in the
1960s, but as a convergence of widely different scientific disciplines: astron-
omy, biology, paleontology, oceanography, microbiology, geology, and ge-
netics, among others.
In one sense, astrobiology is the field of biology ratcheted up to en-
compass not just life on Earth but also life beyond Earth. It forces us to re-
consider the life of our planet as but a single example of how life might work,
rather than as the only example. Astrobiology requires us to break the shack-
les of conventional biology; it insists that we consider entire planets as eco-
logical systems. It requires an understanding of fossil history. It makes us
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R A R E E A R T H
think in terms of long sweeps of time rather than simply the here and now.
Most fundamentally, it demands an expansion of our scientific vision—in
time and space.
Because it involves such disparate scientific fields, the Astrobiology
Revolution is dissolving many boundaries between disciplines of science. A
paleontologist’s discovery of a new life form from billion-year-old rocks in
Africa is of major consequence to a planetary geologist studying Mars. A sub-
marine probing the bottom of the sea finds chemicals that affect the calcula-
tions of a planetary astronomer. A microbiologist sequencing a string of
genes influences the work of an oceanographer studying the frozen oceans of
Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons) in the lab of a planetary geologist. The most
unlikely alliances are forming, breaking down the once-formidable academic
barriers that have locked science into rigid domains. New findings from di-
verse fields are being brought to bear on the central questions of astrobiol-
ogy: How common is life in the universe? Where can it survive? Will it leave
a fossil record? How complex is it? There are bouts of optimism and pes-
simism; E-mails fly; conferences are hastily assembled; research programs are
rapidly redirected as discoveries mount. The excitement is visceral, powerful,
dizzying, relentless. The practitioners are captivated by a growing belief: Life
is present beyond Earth.
The great surprise of the Astrobiology Revolution is that it has arisen in
part from the ashes of disappointment and scientific despair. As far back as
the 1950s, with the classic Miller–Urey experiments showing that organic
matter could be readily synthesized in a test tube (thus mimicking early Earth
environments), scientists thought they were on the verge of discovering how
life originated. Soon thereafter, amino acids were discovered in a newly fallen
meteorite, showing that the ingredients of life occurred in space. Radio-
telescope observations soon confirmed this, revealing the presence of organic
material in interstellar clouds. It seemed that the building blocks of life per-
meated the cosmos. Surely life beyond Earth was a real possibility.
When the Viking I spacecraft approached Mars in 1976, there was great
hope that the first extraterrestrial life—or at least signs of it—would be found
(see Figure I.1). But Viking did not find life. In fact, it found conditions hostile
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Introduction
Figure I.1 Percival Lowell’s 1908 globe of Mars. Some thought that the linear features were irri-
gation canals built by Martians.
to organic matter: extreme cold, toxic soil and lack of water. In many people’s
minds, these findings dashed all hopes that extraterrestrial life would ever be
found in the solar system. This was a crushing blow to the nascent field of as-
trobiology.
At about this time there was another major disappointment: The first se-
rious searches for “extrasolar” planets all yielded negative results. Although
many astronomers believed that planets were probably common around
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R A R E E A R T H
other stars, this remained only abstract speculation, for searches using Earth-
based telescopes gave no indication that any other planets existed outside our
own solar system. By the early 1980s, little hope remained that real progress
in this field would occur, for there seemed no way that we could ever detect
worlds orbiting other stars.
Yet it was also at this time that a new discovery paved the way for the
interdisciplinary methods now commonly used by astrobiologists. The 1980
announcement that the dinosaurs were not wiped out by gradual climate
change (as was so long thought) but rather succumbed to the catastrophic ef-
fects of the collision of a large comet with Earth 65 million years ago, was a
watershed event in science. For the first time, astronomers, geologists, and bi-
ologists had reason to talk seriously with one another about a scientific prob-
lem common to all. Investigators from these heretofore separate fields found
themselves at the same table with scientific strangers—all drawn there by the
same question: Could asteroids and comets cause mass extinction? Now, 20
years later, some of these same participants are engaged in a larger quest: to
discover how common life is on planets beyond Earth.
The indication that there was no life on Mars and the failure to find ex-
trasolar planets had damped the spirits of those who had begun to think of
themselves as astrobiologists. But the field involves the study of life on Earth
as well as in space, and it was from looking inward—examining this planet—
that the sparks of hope were rekindled. Much of the revitalization of astrobi-
ology came not from astronomical investigation but from the discovery, in
the early 1980s, that life on Earth occurs in much more hostile environments
than was previously thought. The discovery that some microbes live in sear-
ing temperatures and crushing pressures both deep in the sea and deep be-
neath the surface of our planet was an epiphany: If life survives under such
conditions here, why not on—or in—other planets, other bodies of our solar
system, or other plants and moons of far-distant stars?
Just knowing that life can stand extreme environmental conditions,
however, is not enough to convince us that life is actually there. Not only must
life be able to live in the harshness of a Mars, Venus, Europa, or Titan; it must
also have been able either to originate there or to travel there. Unless it can be
xxii
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Introduction
shown that life can form, as well as live, in extreme environments, there is lit-
tle hope that even simple life is widespread in the Universe. Yet here, too,
revolutionary new findings lead to optimism. Recent discoveries by geneti-
cists have shown that the most primitive forms of life on Earth—those that
we might expect to be close to the first life to have formed on our planet—
are exactly those tolerant life forms that are found in extreme environments.
This suggests to some biologists that life on Earth originated under conditions
of great heat, pressure, and lack of oxygen—just the sorts of conditions found
elsewhere in space. These findings give us hope that life may indeed be
widely distributed, even in the harshness of other planetary systems.
The fossil record of life on our own planet is also a major source of rel-
evant information. One of the most telling insights we have gleaned from the
fossil record is that life formed on Earth about as soon as environmental con-
ditions allowed its survival. Chemical traces in the most ancient rocks on
Earth’s surface give strong evidence that life was present nearly 4 billion years
ago. Life thus arose here almost as soon as it theoretically could. Unless this
occurred utterly by chance, the implication is that nascent life itself forms—
is synthesized from nonliving matter—rather easily. Perhaps life may origi-
nate on any planet as soon as temperatures cool to the point where amino
acids and proteins can form and adhere to one another through stable chem-
ical bonds. Life at this level may not be rare at all.
The skies too have yielded astounding new clues to the origin and dis-
tribution of life in the Universe. In 1995 astronomers discovered the first ex-
trasolar planets orbiting stars far from our own. Since then, a host of new
planets have been discovered, and more come to light each year.
For a while, some even thought we had found the first record of extra-
terrestrial life. A small meteorite discovered in the frozen icefields of Antarc-
tica appears to be one of many that originated on Mars, and at least one of
these may be carrying the fossilized remains of bacteria-like organisms of ex-
traterrestrial origin. The 1996 discovery was a bombshell. The President of
the United States announced the story in the White House, and the event
triggered an avalanche of new effort and resolve to find life beyond Earth. But
evidence—at least from this particular meteorite—is highly controversial.
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R A R E E A R T H
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Introduction
RARE PLANET?
If we cast off our bonds of subjectivity about Earth and the solar system, and
try to view them from a truly “universal” perspective, we also begin to see as-
pects of Earth and its history in a new light. Earth has been orbiting a star
with relatively constant energy output for billions of years. Although life may
exist even on the harshest of planets and moons, animal life—such as that on
Earth—not only needs much more benign conditions but also must have
those conditions present and stable for great lengths of time. Animals as we
know them require oxygen. Yet it took about 2 billion years for enough oxy-
gen to be produced to allow all animals on Earth. Had our sun’s energy out-
put experienced too much variation during that long period of development
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R A R E E A R T H
(or even afterward), there would have been little chance of animal life evolv-
ing on this planet. On worlds that orbit stars with less consistent energy out-
put, the rise of animal life would be far chancier. It is difficult to conceive of
animal life arising on planets orbiting variable stars, or even on planets orbit-
ing stars in double or triple stellar systems, because of the increased chances
of energy fluxes sterilizing the nascent life through sudden heat or cold. And
even if complex life did evolve in such planetary systems, it might be difficult
for it to survive for any appreciable time.
Our planet was also of suitable size, chemical composition, and distance
from the sun to enable life to thrive. An animal-inhabited planet must be a
suitable distance from the star it orbits, for this characteristic governs
whether the planet can maintain water in a liquid state, surely a prerequisite
for animal life as we know it. Most planets are either too close or too far from
their respective stars to allow liquid water to exist on the surface, and al-
though many such planets might harbor simple life, complex animal life
equivalent to that on Earth cannot long exist without liquid water.
Another factor clearly implicated in the emergence and maintenance of
higher life on Earth is our relatively low asteroid or comet impact rate. The
collision of asteroids and comets with a planet can cause mass extinctions, as
we have noted. What controls this impact rate? The amount of material left
over in a planetary system after formation of the planets influences it: The
more comets and asteroids there are in planet-crossing orbits, the higher the
impact rate and the greater the chance of mass extinctions due to impact. Yet
this may not be the only factor. The types of planets in a system might also
affect the impact rate and thus play a large and unappreciated role in the evo-
lution and maintenance of animals. For Earth, there is evidence that the giant
planet Jupiter acted as a “comet and asteroid catcher,” a gravity sink sweeping
the solar system of cosmic garbage that might otherwise collide with Earth.
It thus reduced the rate of mass extinction events and so may be a prime rea-
son why higher life was able to form on this planet and then maintain itself.
How common are Jupiter-sized planets?
In our solar system, Earth is the only planet (other than Pluto) with a
moon of such appreciable size compared to the planet it orbits, and it is the
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Introduction
only planet with plate tectonics, which causes continental drift. As we will try
to show, both of these attributes may be crucial in the rise and persistence of
animal life.
Perhaps even a planet’s placement in a particular region of its home
galaxy plays a major role. In the star-packed interiors of galaxies, the fre-
quency of supernovae and stellar close encounters may be high enough to
preclude the long and stable conditions apparently required for the develop-
ment of animal life. The outer regions of galaxies may have too low a per-
centage of the heavy elements necessary to build rocky planets and to fuel
the radioactive warmth of planetary interiors. The comet influx rate may even
be affected by the nature of the galaxy we inhabit and by our solar system’s
position in that galaxy. Our sun and its planets move through the Milky Way
galaxy, yet our motion is largely within the plane of the galaxy as a whole,
and we undergo little movement through the spiral arms. Even the mass of a
particular galaxy might affect the odds of complex life evolving, for galactic
size correlates with its metal content. Some galaxies, then, might be far more
amenable to life’s origin and evolution than others. Our star—and our solar
system—are anomalous in their high metal content. Perhaps our very galaxy
is unusual.
Finally, it is likely that a planet’s history, as well as its environmental con-
ditions, plays a part in determining which planets will see life advance to an-
imal stages. How many planets, otherwise perfectly positioned for a history
replete with animal life, have been robbed of that potential by happen-
stance? An asteroid impacting the planet’s surface with devastating and life-
exterminating consequences. Or a nearby star exploding into a cataclysmic
supernova. Or an ice age brought about by a random continental configura-
tion that eliminates animal life through a chance mass extinction. Perhaps
chance plays a huge role.
Ever since Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus plucked it from the
center of the Universe and put it in orbit around the sun, Earth has been pe-
riodically trivialized. We have gone from the center of the Universe to a
small planet orbiting a small, undistinguished star in an unremarkable region
of the Milky Way galaxy—a view now formalized by the so-called Principle
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R A R E E A R T H
of Mediocrity, which holds that we are not the one planet with life but one
of many. Various estimates for the number of other intelligent civilizations
range from none to 10 trillion.
If it is found to be correct, however, the Rare Earth Hypothesis will re-
verse that decentering trend. What if the Earth, with its cargo of advanced
animals, is virtually unique in this quadrant of the galaxy—the most diverse
planet, say, in the nearest 10,000 light-years? What if it is utterly unique: the
only planet with animals in this galaxy or even in the visible Universe, a bas-
tion of animals amid a sea of microbe-infested worlds? If that is the case, how
much greater the loss the Universe sustains for each species of animal or plant
driven to extinction through the careless stewardship of Homo sapiens?
Welcome aboard.
xxviii
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at the upper part and terminating posteriorly at the lower part of the
body cavity.
Muscles.
The minute structure of the muscles does not differ essentially from
what obtains in Vertebrate animals. The muscles are aggregations of
minute fibrils which are transversely striated, though in variable
degree. Those in the thorax are yellow or pale brown, but in other
parts the colour is more nearly white. The muscles of flight are
described as being penetrated by numerous tracheae, while those
found elsewhere are merely surrounded by these aerating tubules.
Nervous System.
Besides the brain and the great chain of ganglia there exists an
accessory system, or systems, sometimes called the sympathetic,
vagus, or visceral system. Although complex, these parts are
delicate and difficult of dissection, and are consequently not so well
known as is the ganglionic chain. There is a connecting or median
nerve cord, communicating with the longitudinal commissures of
each segment, and itself dilating into ganglia at intervals; this is
sometimes called the unpaired system. There is another group of
nerves having paired ganglia, starting from a small ganglion in the
forehead, then connecting with the brain, and afterwards extending
along the oesophagus to the crop and proventriculus (Fig. 66). This
is usually called the stomatogastric system. The oesophageal ring
we have already spoken of.
Organs of Sense.
The other senses and sense organs of Insects are even less known,
and have given rise to much perplexity; for though many structures
have been detected that may with more or less probability be looked
on as sense organs, it is difficult to assign a particular function to any
of them, except it be to the sensory hairs. These are seated on
various parts of the body. The chitinous covering, being a dead, hard
substance, has no nerves distributed in it, but it is pierced with
orifices, and in some of these there is implanted a hair which at its
base is in connexion with a nerve; such a structure may possibly be
sensitive not only to contact with solid bodies, but even to various
kinds of vibration. We give a figure (Fig. 67) of some of these hairs
on the caudal appendage of a cricket, after Vom Rath. The small
hairs on the outer surface of the chitin in this figure have no sensory
function, but each of the others probably has; and these latter, being
each accompanied by a different structure, must, though so closely
approximated, be supposed to have a different function; but in what
way those that have no direct connexion with a nerve may act it is
difficult to guess.
Various parts of the mouth are also the seats of sense organs of
different kinds, some of them of a compound character; in such
cases there may be a considerable number of hairs seated on
branches of a common nerve as figured by Vom Rath[40] on the apex
of the maxillary palp of Locusta viridissima, or a compound organ
such as we represent in Fig. 68 may be located in the interior of the
apical portion of the palp.
The functions of the various structures that have been detected are,
as already remarked, very difficult to discover. Vom Rath thinks the
cones he describes on the antennae and palpi are organs of smell,
while he assigns to those on the maxillae, lower lip, epipharynx, and
hypopharynx the rôle of taste organs, but admits he cannot draw any
absolute line of distinction between the two forms. The opinions of
Kraepelin, Hauser, and Will, as well as those of various earlier
writers, are considered in Sir John Lubbock's book on this subject.
[41]
The salivary glands are present in many Insects, but are absent in
others. They are situate in the anterior portion of the body, and are
very variable in their development, being sometimes very extensive,
in other cases inconspicuous. They consist either of simple tubes
lined with cells, or of branched tubes, or of tubes dilated laterally into
little acini or groups of bags, the arrangement then somewhat
resembling that of a bunch of grapes. There are sometimes large
sacs or reservoirs connected with the efferent tubes proceeding from
the secreting portions of the glands. The salivary glands ultimately
discharge into the mouth, so that the fluid secreted by them has to
be swallowed in the same manner as the food, not improbably along
with it. The silk so copiously produced by some larvae comes from
very long tubes similar in form and situation to the simple tubes of
the salivary glands.
The Malpighian tubules are present in most Insects, though they are
considered on good authority to be absent in many Collembola and
in some Thysanura. They are placed near the posterior part of the
body, usually opening into the alimentary canal just at the junction of
the stomach and the intestine, at a spot called the pylorus. They vary
excessively in length and in number,[43] being sometimes only two,
while in other cases there may be a hundred or even more of them.
In some cases they are budded off from the hind-gut of the embryo
when this is still very small; in other cases they appear later;
frequently their number is greater in the adult than it is in the young.
In Gryllotalpa there is one tube or duct with a considerable number
of finer tubes at the end of it. There is no muscular layer in the
Malpighian tubes, they being lined with cells which leave a free canal
in the centre. The tubes are now thought, on considerable evidence,
to be organs for the excretion of uric acid or urates, but it is not
known how they are emptied. Marchal has stated[44] that he has
seen the Malpighian tubes, on extraction from the body, undergo
worm-like movements; he suggests that their contents may be
expelled by similar movements when they are in the body.
Respiratory Organs.
Peyrou has shown[53] that the atmosphere extracted from the bodies
of Insects (Melolontha) is much less rich in oxygen than the
surrounding atmosphere is, and at ordinary temperatures always
contains a much larger proportion of carbonic acid: he finds, too, that
as in the leaves with which he makes a comparison, the proportion
of oxygen augments as the protoplasmic activity diminishes. Were
such an observation carried out so as to distinguish between the air
in the tracheal system and the gas in other parts of the body the
result would be still more interesting.