An Earth Sculpted by Life and Death






The other day I sent around an essay from Aeon which spoke about the way our Earth was created and then modified by various inorganic and organic actions.

I had often thought about this twofold interactive process but I had never been able to really "nail" it. The superb essay by Olivia Judson really did it for me! She put it into a framework and perspective which allowed me to see the entire picture from a number of reference points.


https://aeon.co/essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution?

What she brought together was a series of thoughts which had started for me at secondary school, then advanced by my discoveries such as Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" as well as reading Darwin, Russell and others along the way. But of course I am an amateur and a pretty lazy one at that.


I've only read one entire book by Darwin, and bits and pieces by many others. Our friend Ian Gibbins who is well versed in all these matters will be following up soon with another blog related to this subject area.

In the meantime, coincidentally Aeon published a visual special on Saturday which I had previously posted in September last year:

It is about life and death, birth and decay, life out of death and the role of micro organisms.

It's not for the squeamish Yorick!

You may have seen it already, but I think it's well worth another look, especially in the light of the essay by Olivia Judson.

I have also asked Ian if he will do something in more detail about this entire area of natural history and he said that he would.

Now I'm going to open that new page with Ian's little piece "The Ferrovores" which may only be a short video, but it is about a very large subject... "creatures which eat iron"...

 


A planet formed from gases and rocks, full of minerals and water... which was moulded by gravity and incredible currents of molten rock, for millions of years until something occurred which we call "life". Microscopic life forms came into existence and together with the forces which were moulding the planet, they interacted to create different stages... AEONS, EPOCHS, before coming to an era which supports the sort of life we find around us today, a process of 4 BILLION YEARS or more.

And as you all know from existing volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis we experience in our time, the Earth is still FORMING.

It has never stopped forming from one entity to a different entity. Once it may have been "Snowball Earth", a globe wrapped in ice from Pole to Pole. But now the ice cover is shrinking every year, every month, every day. 

But there's still a lot of life out there, up there, down there around us. At the base of all this is the role played by microscopic organisms which have lived and died.  In their living and devouring, thriving and dying they have generated the world which we have inherited but which we are very busily destroying.

How long will it last? Some of my friends have suggested we might have 100 years , but I'm not so optimistic, the signs I see around us are so terrible that I think we are well past the tipping point.


I hope I'm wrong about that. 

While there is life there is hope, THEY say!

I hope THEY are right. 


pt





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