12. How do we exist? (A K2S Question)

From The Space Library

There are many ways to explain or guess why we exist and no single answer satisfies every person! A physicist or other scientist might give a very simple answer: she or he might say that we exist because the conditions necessary for us to exist are present. For example, we and all other life that we know of on Earth need liquid water in order to survive. That means we wouldn't exist if we were not near a star like the Sun. The Sun keeps the water on Earth from freezing solid. But if we got too close to the Sun all of the water on Earth would boil and evaporate. We and all other life on Earth exist because the Earth is at just the right distance from the Sun to sustain liquid water. But that's not enough. The water and all other chemical elements necessary for life had to be here to start with. That requires the existence of stars to produce the chemical elements in hot nuclear reactions. But now we have to explain how stars exist! You can see that the question gets bigger and bigger. All I've really described is how we exist, not why we exist. There is no scientific way to answer the question why we exist. In fact even philosophy and religion, both ways that people try to answer that important question, cannot give us simple answers that everyone can agree on.

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Answer provided by Luke Keller, Ph.D.

Question and Answer extracted from the book Kids to Space - by Lonnie Schorer

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