Abstract

The derivation of terrestrial life is said to have required a much greater amount of ultraviolet radiation than the Sun presently supplies. And yet the Sun is claimed to have been much dimmer at the very time life rose on Earth. The emergence of life is also said to have required vast electrical discharges, but the electric energy that Earth can produce through atmospheric lightning lacks the required potency to accomplish what is needed. The manner in which miles-deep glaciers accumulated during Earth's past ice ages has never been resolved. What is even worse is that lands within the Arctic circle had actually basked in warmth during these ice ages, as they continued to do in between these ages down into geologically recent times. Judging by what has been discovered in these northern latitudes, this warmth managed to sustain sub-tropical species of flora as well as fauna, species which are not presently able to thrive in those same regions. And as if that is not enough, newer discoveries continue to strengthen an older assumption that this sub-tropical life had appeared much earlier in Arctic regions than it did farther south. This is a situation that continued to maintain itself long after the continental plates are believed to have settled in their present configurations. As far-fetched as it might seem to most, this conundrum has led some paleontologists to a conclusion that flies in the face of what we know, or think we know, concerning the history of the Solar System.