Extremophiles in the Goldilocks Zone

Let me reiterate that, I am not a science guy.  I wish I was,  but I am a truck driver in West Texas. There are no PHDs after my name. Scientific knowledge has nothing to do with why I am an Atheist. Nothing!

I am not an expert on the big bang, abiogenesis, genetics, DNA, RNA, or any other scientific gobbelty gook.  I don’t know what existed before the big bang if anything. I don’t really care either. If you come at me with that old, “How did something come from nothing”?”nonsense, I’m going to be like, bro… first show there was nothing, and even if you show me there was nothing then my answer would still be, I don’t know. I’m not arguing about that. Not even worried about it right now, maybe later, probably not. Talk to someone like Aron Ra if you want to fight about that! If don’t know who that is, find out!

Some sciency guy that does have PHDs is welcome to correct all the mistakes I make in this post. Christian apologists are also welcome to tell me I’m wrong. Bring evidence though, it’s more convincing that way.

This post is a refutation, based on my understanding, of one creationist claim by looking at the way the world actually works, and it’s only a refutation of that one claim. 

The claim goes something like this: the Earth is at the exact correct distance to support life, and all of the various universal laws and constants have had to work together in planned harmony in order for life to arise anywhere and therefore a creator must have put it there. What they really mean though, is life as WE know it! It’s called the Fine-Tuned Universe Argument. The universe is fine-tuned — therefore God.

The Earth specific part of the claim is what I want to address here. I have also seen some making the additional claim that if the universe had been just 10%, or 5% or even 1% different in its orbit (some even say 10ft) closer or farther away we would either burn up or freeze to death or never have existed in the first place.

My response is… nuh-uh! There ya go, completely refuted. Nuh-uh should literally put a stop to that shit. But just in case it doesn’t let’s talk about a couple more things.

Firstly, Eath’s orbit varies wildly. It has an elliptical orbit that changes by millions of miles during the year. It can be as close as 91 million miles or as far away as 94 million miles. Maybe 3 million miles doesn’t sound like a lot, but the Earth is less than 8000 miles across. which means you could fit 3750 Earth’s end to end in that space. Not exactly a nice circular orbit.

By the way, this assumes the reader understands and accepts the reality of a heliocentric universe. If your a flat Earther or otherwise don’t understand that we live on a sphere that rotates a sun and not the other way around (like your holy books say) then I can’t help you, bro.

A big part of the argument comes the fact Earth is in what is called the Goldilocks Zone (kind of like the Twilight Zone.. but gold?) Basically it is the area in a solar system in which liquid water can survive, and thus life as we know it can form and be sustained. Life as WE know it is an important thing to remember there.

An important thing to understand though is that at the time (in the 70s) that scientists started defining what was a habitable area they made certain assumptions. They thought life couldn’t survive in anything colder than Antarctica or hotter than scalding water, they assumed that life as we know it is all the life that can be. 

What we now know though is that life adapts to its environment over time and if the environment changes the animal either adapts or dies. In other words, the world was not created for life, life adapted to the world.

The very idea that this world was made for us is silly. This world has millions of ways to kill us. Most of it is completely uninhabitable by humans and our primate ancestors. However, as time has gone by we have discovered that life is about a million times more diverse than those scientists in the 70s assumed when they decided what was a habitable zone. There are diverse forms of life living in just about every part of this world in the most extreme conditions. They live in environments that would quickly kill you and I. We call these creatures Extremophiles. Which the Oxford Dictionary defines as a microorganism, especially an archaean, that lives in conditions of extreme temperature, acidity, alkalinity, or chemical concentration.
 

About a millimeter long, the tardigrade is a polyextremophile. They can withstand temperatures from -328 °F (200 °C) up to 304 °F (151 °C), lack of oxygen and water, and a thousand times the radiation we can take.

They survive is by going into a state of suspended animation, in which body functions temporarily shut down until conditions improve. They can even survive space. Researchers sent a group of living tardigrades to orbit the earth on the outside of a rocket for 10 days. 68% lived through that.

But Extromphiles are micro-organisms you say, they don’t really count in your opinion? You still think this goldilocks thing is the real deal. While these are not extremophiles here are some critters that have adapted to extreme environments in order to survive.