When life began there were no Baily’s beads

This is the last (currently) of some articles I intended as a connected series. If you have the time, you may appreciate visiting the others first (assuming you haven’t already):

1. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself
2. Asking the right questions
3. Total solar eclipse: coincidence?
4. The Antikythera mechanism

This is part 5: When life began there were no Baily’s beads.

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I suggested recently that the total solar eclipse may have been responsible for instigating intelligent life on our planet , but, at the time, I hadn’t looked that closely at the numbers.

Life began on our planet some 4.25 billion years ago. This was approximately a quarter of a billion years after our moon was formed — assuming that the ‘giant-impact hypothesis‘ is correct, that is.

The window in which a ‘total solar eclipse’ can be seen from the Earth is about 100…