Remixing Our Metaphors We’re not a cancer or a disease. We are organisms doing what all organisms do, surviving and reproducing as best we can. We are, however, a kind of organism that has never exist...
Linepithema humile is a species of ant native to Northern Argentina that has, with our help, become a new kind of global superorganism.
How the hell could you ever know if a scientific theory had a probability of 10-6 of being wrong? For decades we’ve had a running joke about our very scientific fathers, how seriously they take their...
The number of dirigibles made per year has not increased according to this pattern. The average number of cats per household has not increased exponentially. This made, briefly, for a fun game. It’s n...
For the next several million years? Well, it might be, but there’s a hitch. Unfortunately, what Jacob’s results actually show is that Earth can be expected to be stabilized for all this time in an ice...
Using the techniques, perspective, and language of planetary exploration, Sagan, Toon, and Pollack published a paper in Science in 1979, long before climate change became the issue it is now, entitled...
Other than the external threat of asteroid and comet strikes (a common hazard throughout the solar system), all Earth’s natural hazards go hand in hand with its habitability. Indeed, Earth seems to be...
Now, when you hear some people advocating or warning against geoengineering Earth by spraying sun-blocking aerosols into the upper atmosphere, they are proposing to induce a process that is constantly...
Historian Charles Mann has suggested that this mashed-up new biological phase we’ve induced be called the Homogenocene, as we have blended so many evolving populations, once geographically dispersed a...
This comet was much smaller, less than half a mile across, and would miss Mars by about eighty thousand miles. This was still close enough to splatter the atmosphere with hydrogen and dust, producing...
Throughout the early years of the twenty-first century, Zaitsev and his Russian colleagues continued their occasional series of messages from the Crimea to the stars. In addition to the Teen Age Messa...
Margulis and Lovelock were more than willing to mix science with philosophy and poetry, and they didn’t mind controversy; in fact, I’d say they enjoyed and courted it. Gaia, subversively, blurs the bo...
A few times, all the world’s land surface has clumped together into one giant supercontinent, surrounded by one global ocean. Even supercontinents drift, and 450 million years ago the planet was put o...
We are now a part of Earth’s geological record.4 No matter what we do, no matter where we go from here, we have left our mark. One of those indelible signatures will be the sudden disappearance of cer...
Tsiolkovsky’s most well-known quote expresses this sentiment: The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever. Awakenings
This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial...
These disturbances are the product of our human propensity to explore in teams, to develop new tools to expand our domain to places that are not part of our natural habitat.
The carbon cycle has grabbed the headlines, but we’ve also seized hold of many other major geochemical cycles. Through production of fertilizers, we’ve radically altered Earth’s nitrogen cycle. The su...
The Great Oxygenation Event was contemporaneous with one of the most severe ice ages this world has ever known, an event known to geo-nerds as the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth episode.* This was pr...
Some unknown process was, it seemed, protecting CO2 from the anticipated destruction. This unexpected and strange stability presented a puzzle, which was solved by Michael McElroy at Harvard and Ron P...