Part 8
Hard to believe because it was a fact: Life actually comes ashore !!!
After talking about the first life in the water, I now feel very comfortable to take the land route………then let’s go !
Quite simply stated….. many millennia have passed since the oceans dominated the rocky shores of our planet. An extremely comfortable habitat. A truly cozy home for all the creatures that existed at that time. Because the food practically swam right past your nose. Pleasantly warm and humid and also protected from radiation from outer space. This state of evolution can be described as highly perfect!
But look, one day the water was no longer good enough for some of these living pleasure seekers and they went ashore. I would have asked them, have you gone mad? Didn’t they know about plate tectonics and convection currents in the Earth’s interior, which were responsible for volcanism, new formation and the sinking of land masses? Because at that time there were no large land masses. What is reasonably reliable is that existing continents only really existed in the last 650 million years of the earth’s history and nobody knows exactly what happened before that. What is certain, however, is that the earth’s surface has constantly changed, as have the sea beds. With today’s knowledge, we can say that at that time it was absolutely not possible to live a carefree life on land. That’s why I say again, they were crazy, because in exactly these turbulent times life does not go on land. However, it is worth mentioning the fact that the banks were raised and swamp strips formed. This ensured that plants that had previously lived completely under water discovered that they could also live quite well on semi-dry land.
Of course, dear reader, you are right when you say that life would not have voluntarily left its traditional habitat, would it? In fact, it was a compulsion that meant: adapt to new circumstances that suddenly prevailed.
So, as a „religion hater“ I’m not saying, of course, that some creator must have tinkered the whole thing to his liking. I’m saying that the convection movement inside the earth shifted the continental plates in such a way that the seas had to retreat in one place or another.
It almost sounds like a rule when you say that so-called top-down living conditions are created to which living beings have to adapt or they die out. Very dramatic, but the adaptable ones have characteristics that simply correspond to the new habitat. All these minor and major changes in a species appear to us to be miraculous feats of chemistry, of biochemistry. Wrong, not a hit, because they are actually the result of natural and purely random variations in the genetic material, and changing environmental conditions select from this cauldron of possibilities those variants that have the best „chances of survival“. This is how „simply“ life works, and this is how land was finally colonized in the Silurian, around 425 million years ago. Among the first settlers looking for a place were plants. They found a huge niche for life completely unoccupied and were able to spread explosively because, despite all the other disadvantages, the light yield on land is simply higher than in water.
…..You should know, pure physics! ……..
But what do you think is achieved by a higher light yield? …..The penny drops, I hear it….yes right, a higher efficiency of photosynthesis…more light more energy. At the same time, the amount of biomass increased and the more biomass, the higher the oxygen content. In the end, animals were created, so we can say that all the life cycles we know today were formed, only in completely different contexts, of course.
It all looks as if the beginning of this explosion of life went very smoothly. But wasn’t there also something worrying about this beginning?
Sounds like a hypothesis, but beware, it is now supported by a lot of evidence. It is the „Snowball Earth“ hypothesis.
Snowball ? ….. sounds like cold. Yes, about 700 to 950 million years ago there would have been talk of a glaciation of our planet. Strong volcanism, which destroyed the biomass in the sea, was the reason for this. Both led to less and less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at that time. This in turn brought the greenhouse effect to a standstill and the temperature collapsed almost completely to almost 18°C,
The end result was that the planet „Earth“ became a huge and icy snowball.
Only after a few years did volcanism take hold and its eruptions spewed out enough material onto newly formed continents.
…..See there, the carbon dioxide cycle began its old activity again……ever more, our Earth was now transformed into the „blue planet“ we know today.
I suspect that this was also the beginning of the development of the „Cambrian explosion of life“ 650 million years ago. Now I have to come back to the properties of plate tectonics for good reason, because whenever it is at work, it makes for interesting stories, and this time I’ll go into a little more detail. Because Africa, hear……hört…is getting closer !!!
That’s as certain as the Amen in the long since totally superfluous God barracks. (churches, mosques, etc.)
At the speed at which my thumbnail is growing, for example, the earth plate „Africa“ will one day have pushed the Strait of Gibraltar shut. I avoid pointing out the consequences for the Mediterranean. Because the well-known saying has already spread throughout Europe:
And what will happen to the Mediterranean then? It no longer has the means to supply itself with water from the Atlantic ….. and simply dries up. Oh dear !
I always think of special places in the south of France, where I discovered lots of mussel shells on a hill of vines, which is a bit like the Africa effect I just mentioned in the future. There used to be water there…!
Dear readers, please take your time to look at the different time scales of the earth’s evolution. There you can see the plate tectonic changes on a scale of millions and millions of years. The time scales of climatic changes are also shown, but they are only a few tens of thousands of years. However, local changes in geography are the fastest.
If you remember all the principles of evolution: competition and cooperation, variation and selection, you will see that below are all the hierarchies of processual time scales. Let’s change the subject and turn to a fraction of the history of biomass. The conditions have been perfect, so they are right. That’s why an incredible amount of life is created on Earth. There is plenty of space, the weather is consistently warm. A new geological era begins, the Carboniferous, and a vast amount of life and diversity develops. I list: huge forests with sky-high trees, oversized horsetails. Almost a phenomenon: but according to the laws of physics, a tree should only grow ten meters high, if it grows higher, gravity pulls the water it needs down again. So how can the tree grow to a paltry 20 or 30 meters? Don’t laugh, I say because it sweats! The tree perspires right down to the last branches of its tiny leaves. This transpiration enables the tree to grow higher. This is a really great mechanism, but unfortunately it has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Trees must therefore have been incredibly successful in the Carboniferous period, because a magnificent, overflowing, lush world grew up there. During this paradisiacal time, even insects, huge in size, evolved. A new technique of tracheal respiration helped.
(Tracheal respiration is one of four types of respiration in living organisms. The others are lung, skin and gill respiration…
Which animals use tracheae to breathe !
Animals that breathe through tracheae are mainly insects, arachnids and invertebrates,
such as caterpillars, crabs, scorpions and millipedes).
Please read more detailed explanations on the. Internet. # tierchenwelt dot de….. „good spelling, right“
It turned out that breathing was very efficient. Life took place with up to 35% oxygen in the atmosphere at that time, or rather, it was just possible
The question surely follows: 35% oxygen, what happens if there is too much oxygen in the air? Oxygen is a chemically highly active substance because it is a connector. It combines with everything. This is pure oxidation. If it happens in its particularly hot and fast form, we speak of „fire“. And as already mentioned, our planet is literally bursting with life and fire. Huge amounts of biomass are often burned again. Whoever speaks of fire also thinks of water. Large floods naturally helped to extinguish the many fires. Fires were triggered by countless thunderstorms. Thunderstorms, ? All it took was a flash of lightning!
But I say, fires nowadays are clearly the responsibility of the idiot of man, 99% of them will do anything for money. The same applies to water damage, the idiots like to straighten all watercourses. The zigzag flow of rivers makes most of them nervous! All these natural processes that we experience around us today were already there back then.
But fortunately man had to wait a long time before he could start his idiotic work on this planet. Back then, I am convinced that the world must have been bursting with vitality at „all levels“. Huge coal seams were formed, the largest reserves of fossil fuels that we know of. Oil and lignite were formed much later. Again, I would like to ask the humble question: What does this have to do with the Anthropocene?
In 2014, there were 4.2 billion tons of crude oil and almost 8 billion tons of coal. Just don’t ask me about the CO ² . In 2013, humankind released more than 35 billion tons of CO ² into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And it’s still increasing, despite emissions trading. Today, we release as much carbon into the atmosphere in one year as nature has managed to store in a million years. Yes, these are the figures from 2014 that I looked at first. We are now in 2024 and what does it look like now………I’m sure the well-read and educated know that……!….or look at…
The empirical sciences in particular tell us all kinds of things about the cosmos, the structure of matter, the history of the Earth and much more. Now I ask another question and that is: But what do we do with the knowledge we have gained?
In short, the knowledge is a…..
1) ….. insight gained through the mental processing of impressions and experiences
2.)…….the ability to recognize, to grasp the outside world
A reason for me to ask another question ?
Are the findings just nice, interesting or relevant?
I maintain the following…. …without even remotely thinking about the consequences of our actions, we get started. We take a 300 million year old past out of the ground of our planet and…….. burn it. In this inane process, we release a molecule into the atmosphere that stores infrared radiation, i.e. heat radiation.
How happy I am that word has gotten around, it’s hard to believe. The greenhouse effect really does exist. People must have actually worked on it and they got results. Once again, it took a long time for even the untrained layman to realize……. is the much-discussed greenhouse effect that we are experiencing. So what happens to this heat radiation? ……It is absorbed in the atmosphere and not simply radiated back into space, but considerable parts remain below, resulting in a mirror effect. The radiation thus warms up the earth – and the earth warms up the radiation. Interesting effect…..And so the climate researchers can see that it’s getting higher and higher……t’s a shame that it’s mainly just the climate researchers, isn’t it?
Without our industrious and not at all well thought-out actions, this carbon would still be lying dormant in the earth and the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere would not be greatly increased. There will always be slight fluctuations depending on volcanic activity or other natural, cyclical processes that lead to more or less carbon being released into the atmosphere, but these are typical, natural cycles that are also visible on long time scales.
But the fact is, even if it is only a few thousand years, man is crawling around on this planet in a disorderly fashion. If he only crawled, we could sit back and relax these days. But he burrows and digs, burns the carbon and turns it into heat!
Unlike carbon dioxide, however, this is quickly dissipated. I suggest we do a little experiment: we get a kilogram of coal and make it a little warm, because we burn it. The amount of heat it contains can be measured precisely. This combustion process naturally releases carbon dioxide, which rises into the atmosphere.
What comes next, as you readers probably know, is the next question and a bit of math.
or scientific thinking: How long do the free-floating carbon dioxide molecules need to retain the amount of heat generated in the atmosphere?
The retention takes a month, or even a whole month. However, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for much longer than just one month. For this reason, it causes 10,000 to 100,000 times more warming than the bit of coal itself. Oh, that’s very unpleasant. That’s right! This has happened and continues to happen worldwide.
Very simply put, when we burn fossil fuels, we generate heat that is quickly dissipated, but produce CO² and these molecules contribute to the warming of our planet for a terribly long time.
It can also be said that every emitter of carbon dioxide automatically contributes to the general warming of the planet’s atmosphere.
The following statement of mine is also frightening and true: the hard coal on our planet is an incredible 300 million years old. It comes from the time when life descended upon planet Earth with an extremely brutal vitality. Life also clearly overshot the mark in the Carboniferous period and at the same time created the conditions for an epochal event that really began to unfold in the 19th century at the latest ………. – that was „industrialization“. Without hard coal, this would not have been possible at all. Nor would it have been possible without the ancient iron ore, which, believe it or not, was formed around three billion years ago. I already mentioned that.
So the topic deals with mineral resources, which nature has created over an almost unimaginably long period of time.
Then the „human animal“ (industrialization) appeared a short time ago and took them out of the ground at lightning speed. He begins to consume them at the same speed. It only seems to have dawned on him a fraction of a second ago that this was probably not entirely wise! As I have often said, „cause always has an effect“.
Even if man has almost always failed with his decisions during his short history on earth, he can claim that he can at least tell almost the entire history of the earth! ….????…..with a few gaps, no question.
If that’s just the way it is, I let it (the history of the earth) be told plausibly; see how it works…….We succeed because we assume that the laws of nature that we have discovered through experiments also applied back then. We even tell the many even small details. It even continues with making predictions like, Oh, there’s a gap, I expect a certain transitional form of living beings.
And please believe me dear readers, what can I tell you, even relics of this transitional form are being found. We can even determine the age of finds with the help of something that does not age itself: atoms whose nuclei decay.
I just want to shout it out…. We use the causal cause-and-effect chains that we know from the empirical sciences. We carry out masses of experiments, the results of which are reproducible and therefore history-free. They can be repeated by us anywhere in the world, regardless of whether the experimenters are vegans (like me), or whether they believe in a god (by pure mistake), whether they are capitalists, imperialists or communists – we, the scientists, don’t care! Because the results obtained are basically the same.
We then use the results we have obtained to reconstruct historical processes. So we know how old the carbon material is that we have been burning for a few years. We also know what happens when we oxidize carbon and what incredible amounts of energy are released in the process. I maintain that at least a relatively tiny group knows this, because they are involved or interested in science. We can be highly impressed when we say that humans have an incredible amount of knowledge. These are the ones that – and this is absolutely incomparable in the realm of living beings and our planet – leave us with fabulous options for action!
But, as you readers know, my question follows and it is :
What will we do with this privilege in the future?
What we have already done with it is well known, isn’t it?