Something New to Appreciate Planet Earth For

I learned something new today. There is a good deal of evidence that 650 million years ago this planet underwent the worst ice age it has ever seen. An ice age that covered the entire planet, from pole to pole in a solid sheet of ice up to 1,000 feet thick.

We enter an ice age roughly every 100,000 years. Generally they follow the same story. The earth's orbit slowly takes it further and further away from the sun, gradually dropping temperatures globally. The polar ice caps begin to spread toward the equator, though they never get there. They always stop quite a distance away as the planet slowly returns to its position nearer to the sun. But this ice age was different. Not only was the planet further from the sun, it also, through various reasons that would take too long to explain here, was losing vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, locking it in limestone deposits beneath the ocean. CO2, a greenhouse gas, normally helps the atmosphere warm and retain heat. So much was being stripped from the atmosphere temperatures plummeted. The ice spread from the poles much faster than it ever had before, or has since.

And here's the wild part. Snow covered glacial ice is the best reflector of the suns rays on the planet, reflecting nearly all of the sun's energy back into space. Ocean water is the poorest reflector, absorbing far more heat than it reflects back. So as the glaciers spread across the planet, glacial ice replacing ocean water, the planet reflected more and more heat back into space. Eventually it reached a critical mass, creating a runaway, self-perpetuating cooling event. The less liquid water there was the less heat the planet retained cooling the planet further, creating more ice, which replaced even more of the liquid water. In no time (cosmically speaking) earth was completely locked in ice, a giant snowball hurtling around a sun that was powerless to help it.

The planet stayed like that for millions of years. Eventually volcanic activity below earth's surface, which ebbs and flows entered a very active period. Over a span of about a million years volcanoes, which emit large quantities of CO2, gave off enough of the greenhouse gas to get the planet warming again. And as more ice melted and more water was released the planet retained more heat and thawed ever faster. Eventually the ice age to end all ice ages was over.

Now here's the really cool part. Before this global freeze life had been evolving on the planet for nearly three billion years. And in that time it hadn't gotten beyond single-celled organisms. These organisms were trapped below (and in) the ice. They either had to adapt or die. Those that did survive were truly the heartiest of the hearty. The cream of the genetic coffee. When the ice finally melted the earth saw the biggest boom in evolution that had ever occurred. It helped that the chemistry involved in a global, prolonged freeze / thaw created more oxygen than had ever existed in the atmosphere before (oxygen levels in the air went from 1% to %20). The hearty survivors of the global ice holocaust, in the newly-created, oxygen rich world went wild. For the first time in three billion years multi-cellular creatures appeared. And in what is called the Cambrian Explosion, multi-cellular life...exploded. After three billion years of stagnancy, huge numbers of complex life forms begin appearing in the fossil record over a period of only 80 million years.

The global freeze had the potential to wipe out all life, such as it was, on earth. Instead it ended up kick-starting evolution, creating a massive diversity of life forms that eventually led to us. It's very possible that had this massive ice age never occurred earth would still be a planet dominated by single cell "slime" life. So give thanks to the universe's unforgiving nature. Had it been kinder to our planet we'd likely not be here.

Imaginary Competitions of One

I think competition must be what motivates human beings to move forward. It drives free enterprise. It's why professional sports exist. Why American Idol is the most popular TV show in America. And why, in this economy, a job in hand, even if it isn't perfect, is worth three in the ridiculously overcrowded bush. That's just a empathetic shout out to all my unemployed friends. May you crush your competition in glorious combat.

Our urge to compete is so strong, so innate, we make up competitions, even if we're the only ones participating. Case in point. I contribute to my company's blog, "The Renegade Agency Confessional" (adagencyconfessional.blogspot.com) on occasion. It's been in existence for more than a year now, has a much larger readership than this humble blog, and has, up until this post, logged more entries. But I knew, at two posts a day, everyday, Kate's and my small cyberstake in the blogosphere would eventually overtake it's larger sibling. It's a silly competition, but I check its status often. It's important to me, and I don't know why. It's just fun to compete with something that doesn't know it's in competition with me and can't do anything to save itself from inevitable defeat. With this entry both blogs have 249 entries, and Kate's next post will push us over. It's beautifully poetic that such a nice round number as 250 would be our victory post.

So in your face...faceless non-sentient abstraction.

It makes sense that competition would be so deeply rooted in our primal brains. Our very existence was made possible by the most ancient of all competitions, natural selection. Millions of years and countless generations of small hairy voles fighting it out in dank holes for limited resources assured that some of them improved, developed opposable thumbs, a proclivity for tree tops and tools, and eventually became use. We're just a small cog in planetary competition machine that continues to sculpt and change itself through the millenias.

Granted the yang side of competition is sponsored by such lovely constructs as "war" and "jealousy" and "screw you, I'm gettin' mine!" But every positive has its dark underbelly. I do believe though that as humanity continues to evolve emotionally and fear and ignorance are stripped away, this darkness will slowly fade. Competition confers plenty of other benefits, and can drive us to be the best possible people we can be.

And has brought us to number 249. Kate, would you do the honors...

Fun with Scale

So here's what I woke up thinking about. Ants and bees, among others, are high-functioning creatures, especially when viewed from the societal level. They possess specialization of function. Career paths, if you will. And yet, they are so small, relative to us and our over-sized world.

But why must we rate everything in comparison to ourselves? What makes us think that, if we ever discovered extra-terrestrial life, it would always exist at our scale? Much larger planets with much stronger gravity could create extremely large animals.* Our planet supported dinosaurs. How much larger could organisms grow on other worlds? How big would a creature have to be so that the relative size difference between and it and us was the same as between us and ants?

Wow, Jason. That's a perfectly useless question. Let's find out!

Ants, according to a random website I found, weigh on average three milligrams, or .003 grams. I, a premium specimen of human being, weigh 91 kilograms, or 91,000 grams. This makes me 30,333,333 times more massive than an ant. Applying that difference to ourselves and our alien interlopers, we find that our soon to be slavemasters would weigh in at a continent crushing 2,760,333,303,000 grams, or 6,085,493,240 pounds (by earth's gravity.)

Six billion pounds. To put that in terms we can process, the Empire State Building is estimated to weigh 365,000,000 kilograms, or 804,687,257 pounds. Our imaginary Meganism is almost eight times more massive than that. So how tall (or long) would it likely be?

Well, since multi-legged critters are measured head to butt, I lopped off our legs temporarily for a truer comparison. Ants are .006 meters long. With my legs removed I'm about .91 meters tall. This makes me 151 times longer than Mr. Ant. Our Meganism then would be roughly 137.5 meters (451 feet) long, or, with legs added back on for an erect walking species, about 275 meters (902 feet) tall. Again, for scale, the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall to the roof. So an erect Meganism would be roughly 3/4 the height of the Empire State Building, and eight times as heavy.

Are these numbers right? Who knows. Who cares. Even if I'm off by a full half, the Giganthors will crush us under their mansion-sized Reeboks. It is interesting how much faster weight grows compared with height or length. I'm sure the width, which we didn't look at, would have something to do with the disparity.

Aren't you glad you finished this?


*I'm not sure I'm right here. Would titanic creatures be more likely on a larger planet with stronger gravity or a smaller planet with weaker gravity? A stronger gravitational pull could might force the indigenous animals to evolve stronger and larger to bear the extra burden. But larger means heavier, and you'd expect evolution to favor lighter creatures on a planet with strong gravity. So maybe a weaker gravitional pull would evolve gigantic creatures, freeing them of the need to be extremely strong and giving more leeway to weight. Anyone know?

The Resilience of Life

During the Permian Extinction, a mass extinction event which occurred roughly 251 million years ago, 96% of marine species were lost and 70% of vertebrate land-dwelling species were killed. It was the worst mass extinction the planet has ever seen.

And yet, here we are.

The Permian Extinction is by far the worst extinction event the planet has ever seen, but it's by no means the only. The most recent, which occurred 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs. There have been five major extinction events since life first percolated in earth's primordial seas, and many other smaller events. In total 99% of the species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct.

But life still flourishes.

I like to remember that when I start worrying about mankind's impact on the planet. We can do, and are actively doing a lot of damage to earth's ecosystem, and if we don't get ourselves in check it's just going to get worse. But even if we manage to pull off destruction on the scale of the Permian Extinction, which would be very difficult, life would manage to soldier on and reblossom after we're gone.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not trying to provide an excuse for inaction. As a species we have unprecedented power over the well-being of our planet. We need to be good stewards of the world that birthed and sustains us, if not for its sake, than for ours. Continuing down our current path leads nowhere good. If we're not careful our species could end up on the pointy end of major mass extinction event number six.

But my point is that, even if this happens, life will rebound and repopulate with new forms and shapes we can't imagine. Life will continue to exist.

Until the sun supernovas and earth is swallowed whole. But that mother-of-all mass extinctions is a long way off.

I Love Beginning Things - An Introduction

It will be some time before anyone but Kate and I read these posts, I assume.  I'd like to think this blog might garner some sort of audience, but it's likely we'll be writing for ourselves for some time.  But in case we do pull in a few readers, or someone in the distant future recovers the bytes that make up this blog off of a hard drive in some decrepite, post-apocolyptic building that used to be a web-hosting company, I'll introduce myself.

My name is Jason, and in some ways I think I skew toward the negative.  I'm cynical for sure, probably a bit jaded, and sometimes a pessimist.  And from what I've seen, I'm not alone.  As a general rule it seems, humanity tends to notice and remember the bad things that happen to them more readily than the good.  This may be some sort of evolutionary survival mechanism.  It was likely more important for our stone age forebears to remember a sabertooth tiger's deadly fangs, and not its soft fur.  Whatever the cause, it would seem we are programmed to see the glass as half empty.

However, I suspect that this proclivity for the negative is more cultural than genetic.  I think it's a learned response to a dangerous world, and thus, a response that can be changed.  That's the purpose of this blog.

Each day for the entirety of 2009, Kate and I are going to write about one thing that we like. Most of our entries probably won't be revelatory.  Mine may revolve around liking pizza and "Dude, Where's My Car."  But some will delve a bit deeper.  The point is this.  By forcing ourselves, on a daily basis to find something positive, something good in the world, we force our minds to shift focus and see, as an immediate response, a half full glass of scotch, instead of a half empty one.  Assuming the experiment works, I'll celebrate by creating a few completely empty glasses of scotch.

So here's my first entry.  I like beginning things.  I like to have many projects going at once.  I often don't finish most of them, probably because it's the starting of the thing that entices me the most.  It's the adventure, the challenge, and the distraction.  I like that, in beginning something, you had no idea what the end is, or where it lies.  There's that heady euphoria that comes with beginnings, where all of your grand visions for your project still seem possible.  I love the hours of thought that go into planning and fantasizing, imagining where a particular project might lead, and the beginning of the project throws open the door for realization.

I like beginning things.