REH

REH may refer to:

Sebeș

Sebeș (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈsebeʃ]; German: Mühlbach; Hungarian: Szászsebes; Transylvanian Saxon dialect: Melnbach) is a city in Alba County, central Romania, southern Transylvania.

Geography

The city lies on the Mureș River valley and it straddles the Sebeș river. It is at the crossroads of two main highways in Romania: European route E68 - DN1 coming from Sibiu and going towards Deva and European route E81 - DN7 coming from Sibiu and going towards Alba-Iulia and Cluj Napoca. A1 motorway (Romania) passes north and east of the city.

It is situated at 15 km south of the county capital Alba Iulia and it also has three villages under its administration:

History

It is believed that there has been an earlier rural settlement in this area, with Romanian and Pecheneg population, situated east of today's city. But the city itself was built by German settlers - later referred as Transylvanian Saxons, but actually originating from the region of Rhine and Moselle - on the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom in the second half of the 12th century and became an important city in medieval Transylvania. Its city walls were reinforced after the Tatar (Mongol) invasions from 1241–1242, but the city was occupied in 1438 by the Ottoman Empire. Transylvania's voivode John I Zápolya died in Sebeș in 1540. The Transylvanian Diet met in Sebeș in 1546, 1556, 1598 and 1600. The location of the meetings, the Zápolya House, is now a museum.

Rare Earth hypothesis

In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth Hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. The hypothesis argues that complex extraterrestrial life is a very improbable phenomenon and likely to be extremely rare. The term "Rare Earth" originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington.

An alternative view point was argued by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, among others. It holds that Earth is a typical rocky planet in a typical planetary system, located in a non-exceptional region of a common barred-spiral galaxy. Given the principle of mediocrity (in the same vein as the Copernican principle), it is probable that the universe teems with complex life. Ward and Brownlee argue to the contrary: that planets, planetary systems, and galactic regions that are as friendly to complex life as are the Earth, the Solar System, and our region of the Milky Way are very rare.