The stresses and complexities of our everyday life can cause us to miss how astonishingly unique a planet we live on. We can easily look all around us, yet see nothing.

Can the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, and the skies above our planet tell us something about our lives? Or are they just silent, background props in our restless play?

Last week we took a quick glimpse into our universe's beginning to see if it could shed some philosophical light on our overtaxed lives. This week let's look at the world around us - our present - and see if there is meaning here.

Regular readers of this column know - at least I hope so by now! - that our orb is not your average planet.

Below us is a crust that is as relatively thin as the peel on an apple. But were it either thicker or thinner, we wouldn't be here.

We have just the right amount of radioactive stuff inside the planet to keep it molten and, most importantly, moving. This flawless crawl causes continents to rise, depressions to fill with water, mountains to climb, and an endless recycling of minerals to provide new soil for plant growth.

Our optimal liquid outer core provides us with the perfect magnetic field, an invisible force field that protects our planet from lethal solar winds.

Around us we have the ideal atmosphere for life: just enough oxygen, just enough nitrogen, just enough carbon dioxide. You couldn't order in a better mix. And the mass of our planet - which determines our gravity - assures we won't lose the good gases, and we won't hold on to the bad ones.

And don't forget that unseen blanket of ozone way above which stands guard against destructive ultraviolet rays that flood our solar system.

We have the perfectly sized neighbors, perfectly placed about us to help us maintain our perfect orbit and tilt and rotation. From the sun itself, out to the Kuiper Belt and beyond, everything is placed exactly where it should be for there to be life right here on this blue dot.

We circle a pristine star which itself is in a pristine position in a pristine galaxy in a pristine part of a galaxy cluster. Alter any of those things and we are not here.

And these are not isolated phenomena. Many of them are perfectly orchestrated works in progress involving many hypercoordinated events.

For example, many moons ago a small planet smacked into proto-Earth at just exactly the right velocity, and the Moon was created from the debris. This collision perfectly thinned our crust and gave us extra radioactive stuff. The new Moon slowed us to a comfortable 24-hour spin. It provides us with life-giving tides. It stabilizes our spin so we barely wobble, and we sure don't fall down.

As described in an earlier article, the fact that Earth has maintained a relatively constant temperature for billions of years required that our warm carbon dioxide blanket gradually thin as our sun gradually heated up. That thinning involved the perfect coordination of plate tectonics, erosion, spin, climate changes, crustal make-up, plant life, etc. If any of these players did not to show up: game over.

You would be hard-pressed to find any thing, any event, or any time from the big bang until now that is not absolutely optimal for human life right at this moment. I have no room to mention the hundred-plus other parameters that make life possible here and now, but when you look up, down, and around you are seeing the ne plus ultra, perfection itself.

And this is just what we happen to know at the moment. How much more is there around us that we do not yet know, but without which there would be no life?
So much for presenting a limited amount of evidence. Here are some questions you and your philosophical friends can wrestle with this week:

What does all this say about our existence? Were all those events for the last 13 billion years, all our perfect laws of nature, all our surroundings, all those intertwined events, all those… well, everything just an endlessly long train of random mistakes that led to our inconceivably perfect home? Or was it designed this way? Is Earth a purposeless boo-boo? Or is it part of a grand scheme from the "Beyond" we talked about last week?

Next week it will get dark. The future of our universe in some eyes is nothing if not absolutely bleak. Or is it? Tune in next week for what our future may tell us about ourselves.