USF Habitable Planet Worksheet

Answer any FIVE (5) of the following 6 questions (PLEASE USE THE UPLOADED FILES FOR ANSWERS)

1-You’re the director of NASA in the year 2250. The Earth is increasingly becoming uninhabitable due to a runaway greenhouse effect caused by human pollution. Your job is to find humanity a new exoplanet to live on beyond our solar system. Technological advances in rockets and space travel put three possible terrestrial exoplanets within reach.

Part 1. Define habitability (5 points)

Part 2. How would you rank these exoplanets (marked on the graph as A, B, and C) as humanity’s new home and why? Your explanation MUST refer to the physical and chemical processes that contribute to habitability. (15 points)

2- Once the Big Bang occurred, life appears to have been inevitable. Review the scientific evidence that supports this view. (15 points)

Intelligent life was not inevitable. Review the scientific evidence that supports this view. (5 points – because it’s a shorter answer)

side note: when testing hypotheses, evidence is never used in support. However, the process of science is complicated. Scientists do sometimes use evidence as support when imagining or constructing new hypotheses.

3- Define the term ‘pioneer organism’ (10 points), and explain how pioneer organisms might ‘improve’ through natural selection (10 points). Use your notes to answer this question, not Google. Google will lead you to a wrong answer and get you zero points.

4-Explain how the method of standard candles works (5 points) and, more importantly, explain how it allowed astronomers to test the Big Bang Theory (15 points).

5- Why is it that different lineages of single-celled eukaryotes were able to evolve multicellularity (i.e., bodies) many times independently but single-celled bacteria (prokaryotes) can never do this?

6-We discussed several geological mechanisms that caused the Archean Earth to cool into a state called ‘Snowball Earth.’ Explain two of these mechanisms.