Skip to main content

The Earth will be fine.

[Comment posted to friends Facebook article thread today. He thought we were ruining the environment, and in this slice of time indeed we are...but a grander context shows this to be a blip on a long history of much bigger changes effected by other life systems on Earth before us.]

In the eye blink of Geologic time that we've been here, Earth...over which we kvetch so, is going to "belch" and free herself of the scourge that is us. The belch may be a super massive Caldera explosion or it may be ...due to her crossing the path of a cosmic pebble dislodged from the Asteroid belt or it may be the next deep Ice Age...but the belch will come. We may go on to reign for 5,000 years of glory and yet...Earth then, can belch and throw *whatever* we evolve into ...headlong into chaos...no matter how powerful. The hiccup in the environmental system that we are indeed causing now will be rectified...and in the vast space of Geologic time to come will be remembered in her records as not much different from thousands of hiccups that came before and thousands that are yet to come. You think we are the first animals to severely change the climate...the biological prolixity of animals is why we have a climate...and the propensity for Earth to periodically upend the Chess board is means we are up next.

During the anoxic transition over a billion years ago...those early aerobic bacteria had no idea they were setting the ground work for oxygen breathers like our selves...from the perspective of the anaerobic forms they were displacing...apocalypse was occurring. When the great dying of the Permian Triassic occurred over 230 million years ago...the small, agile, bipedal progenitors of the dinosaurs benefited from the removal of the larger and previously dominant synodont forms...but after nearly a reign of 150 million years their candle out went with the coming of a cosmic pebble...clearing the way for frightened shrew like nocturnal mammals to ascend. Such hubris we walking Apes have to think that we matter a mote to Earth, we are forgetting that the Earth isn't in here with us, we are in here with the Earth. This isn't our home, or the home of life as much as it is life's prison...from which periodic belching has eliminated the lives of TRILLIONS of living things by fiat. We are going to save the Earth? We are just now able to gawk in wonder at the ghosts of other rocks circling suns far distant...the hope of visiting them, non existent...if the Earth belched now, we are doomed...to the continuous process of change that Earth has gone through...the trillions of us alive today are no different from the trillions that were alive during the Dinosaurs reign...or the trillions that were alive during the Eocene....or the trillions that were alive during the Pleistocene...and we are going to save the Earth??? Really???


We need to save ourselves *from* the Earth.


References:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynodont

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_catastrophe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Tertiary_extinction_event


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene

Comments

Brittany said…
Thought provoking post.
The last lines especially resound with me. I've always felt environmentalists were missing the mark when they operate under the assumption that the earth is perfect and stable and we are what is 'wrong' with it.
Like you say, if we look at the species that came before us and were wiped out in a planetary hiccup, there is no reason our fate won't be the same. Science and technology are our only hopes for longtime species survival. Not 'going back to nature.'

Popular posts from this blog

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert