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 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...
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
Also, Lovelock’s radical idea—pay attention to the atmosphere and look for drastic departures from the expected mixture of gases—now forms the cornerstone of our life-detection strategies.
We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or...
Two stratigraphers asked, Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture? In part, they argued that our presence is as yet too brief a perturbation to merit a named place in the stratigra...
The scientific revolution has revealed us, as individuals, to be incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire existence, not just as individuals but even as a species, to be brief and insubstantial a...
The idea arose when Dan Rothman, a geochemist at MIT, was studying the graphs showing changes in the carbon cycle at the time of the Great Dying. He noticed something about the shape of the curves. He...
We left Earth to its own devices for long enough, it would eventually enter another ice age. This would be much more extreme than the kinds of climate changes we are potentially facing now. During the...
The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated o...
His suggestion is that we should adopt best practices so we don’t turn on our radar systems when they are pointed toward nearby stars, or intersecting the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, where there ar...
States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adv...
Organisms and species do not have cosmological life spans. Gaia does, and this is perhaps a general property of living worlds. Influenced greatly by Lovelock and Margulis, I’ve argued that we are unli...
One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life-giving water, while Venus and M...
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...
Yet among the multiple animal inventions at the dawn of the Cambrian were new forms of mobility. A number of critters began burrowing into these mats and braving the toxic soils beneath them. These di...
What was the question again? Is it when human activity first became detectable in the geological record? When humans first left a clear global marker, or golden spike? When human-induced change to the...
We’ve been lulled into an illusion of stasis by unusual climate stability during our short time here. If you include the rest of our history as a species (most of it), before we started keeping contin...
We need visions of a future in which we have applied our infinite creativity to the task of living on a finite world, where we have embraced our role, become comfortable and proficient as planet-shape...
In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled The World, The Flesh and the Devil that Arthur C. Clarke called, the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever...
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