The Privileged Planet - How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery

Is Earth merely an insignificant speck in a vast and meaningless universe? On the contrary. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery shows that this cherished assumption of materialism is dead wrong. Earth is far more significant than virtually anyone has realized. Contrary to the scientific orthodoxy, it is not an average planet around an ordinary star in an unremarkable part of the Milky Way.

In this provocative book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present a staggering array of evidence that exposes the hollowness of this modern dogma. They demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Readers are taken on a scientific odyssey from a history of tectonic plates, to the wonders of water and solar eclipses, to our location in the Milky Way, to the laws that govern the universe, and to the beginning of cosmic time.

In The Privileged Planet you will discover:
Why the best scientific evidence refutes the misnamed Copernican Principle-the widely held idea that there is nothing special about Earth or its place in the universe
Why the sheer number and size of galaxies does not mean that Earth’s capacity to sustain life is the result of blind chance
How Earth is precisely positioned in the Milky Way-not only for life, but also to allow us to find answers to the greatest mysteries of the universe
Striking ways in which water doesn’t behave like most other liquids-and how each of its quirks makes it perfectly suited for the existence of creatures like us
The harmony of Earth and the Moon: how they work together to sustain Earthly life as one intricate system-and how that system produces the best solar eclipses where Earthly observers can see them
How Jupiter and Saturn protect Earth from cataclysmic destruction
How the laws and constants that govern the universe must be narrowly fine-tuned for the existence of any complex life

The Privileged Planet’s astounding findings should lead any individual to reevaluate entrenched assumptions about the universe-and even to reconsider our very purpose on what so many have dismissed as nothing more than an accident of cosmic evolution.