The miracle of life is not a story about efficiency of energy, material or space.
When you start thinking about the amount of space required to create one Earth the efficiency of creating self-sustaining life seems not very.
Our solar system pivots on the center; the sun represents not only the starting point but also 99.86% of the mass of the entire system. As far as we know you can’t have life without a star and that life certainly can’t be on the star. It is literally the ring leader; almost all the cosmic dust for our solar system went to form the sun. What’s left after the formation of the mandatory center is a mere one-tenth of 1% of building material, barely a dropping from a scrape. You probably couldn’t vacuum your floor cleaner. Yet that one-tenth of 1% produced eight planets and one icy dwarf.
Imagine a 100 liters of water, about 26 gallons (or 220 pounds if you prefer). Dip out one centiliter or about two teaspoons. The water that remains, the 26 gallons minus your two teaspoons, represents the mass of the sun. That small bit that you took out represents all the planets. Almost all of that two teaspoons, 71% of all the planetary mass, is found in one sibling, the gas giant Jupiter.
As far as all the life in this solar system, at least what we can confirm, all of it is found on just one planet. The mass required to create the Earth amounts to only .002% of those two teaspoons. That is two-thousandth of one percent. There are almost ten milliliters in the two teaspoons of water, earth’s mass is .02% of one milliliter. Look at a milliliter of water, in your mind divide it into 100 parts and take two of them. I remind you that all that planetary mass is only one-tenth of one percent of the solar system. Think of the barrel holding 26 gallons. Earth’s mass is just a little bigger than a droplet of mist.
So all this material to make a solar system and only one planet to show life. The truth of gravity is that it hogs orbital planes. There is little chance that two planetary bodies could orbit close enough to share the “sweet spot” of water and life in our system, that distance from the sun not too hot nor too cold from the infernal center. All the life on Earth requires a mere fraction of a fraction of total solar output; only .00000005% or one part of 2.2 billion of the sun's total photons. Given how precious life is you’d think we could have a little more stardust and squeeze in a 100 more earths in the system. In the scale of things there is plenty of room and ample sunshine. Alas the forming of all this from dust abandons any sense of economy of purpose. The laws of gravity to work out the maintaining of planetary orbits; it’s a balance of time and space that is well understood mathematically though we remain clueless on it physically. Gravity pulls on us; we are not sure what it pulls with.
Water, sunlight and earth are the root of life on this planet; two come from above and can’t occur at the same time. Rain, by time, is a short stay over a land mass compared with sun. Both are needed for all lifeforms unless you want to suck on sulfur deep undersea next to a smoking vent. Sunlight radiates from the center and never blinks, we are blessed with an orbit so to hide from it for a night. The sun is the center of our physical existence but certainly not our spiritual one. Before you start wondering why we don’t thank the sun enough for its light and its anchoring role I remind you of our fate. In about five billion years the sun will expend its hydrogen and turns red. When it reaches that stage it expands in size and reaches our orbit. Dust to dust.
