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April 11, 2006
The Explosion
Roughly 2 Billion years ago, there was an explosion. The explosion lasted about 10-20 million years, and represented the single largest expansion of life on our planet, but we (apparently) call it an explosion (sometimes). I think it’s going to be tough to turn that whole thing into an action thriller – I wonder how you would do character development when the leading “actor” is bacteria.
Beth, Becca and I spent a wonderfully interesting afternoon last Saturday at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca. We chose it as a diversion (OK, we were killing time until our appointment (a.k.a. dinner) with Anna), but at least for me, it had a much deeper impact.
After purchasing our tickets, we walked past this wonderful timeline of the last 500 Million years, 544 panels each representing 1 million years. All three of us sort of did a double take – we walked past the descriptive plaque (each panel 1 million years, blah, blah), stared at this wall of panels, and then I walked back to the descriptive plaque to check – yep, each panel is 1 million years. It took me quite a while to take in the temporal scale of the exhibits – my days are consumed by schedules measured in days, weeks and sometimes years, so taking a step back and thinking in terms of millions of years required an adjustment.
To be honest, it’s tough to feel very significant when you realize your life span isn’t long enough to see anything really cool happen, like two continents colliding, or a completely new species emerging. I'll only live long enough to see some species killed off, and that’s the same thing as environmental vandalism (and not something I’m particularly happy about being associated with). The “history” of the United States is kind of a joke – 200 years – like that’s going to matter long term.
The other thing that really amazed me was the number of times that there have been significant declines in the biodiversity of the earth. That’s a really fancy way of saying that (almost) everything died off. The museum was laid out along a timeline, and as you walked through the halls, they had these very iconic markers featuring a skull and crossbones to indicate when the collapse happened. (At then end they had all of them lined up for effect).
But the truly fascinating thing to me was that every time life died off in a major way, it rebounded, smarter, more efficient, more productive. We understand so many forces of nature – gravity, light, the urge to survive and reproduce, etc.. But what force of nature makes animals and plants successively smarter, harder working and more complex? (Becca – would you get on that problem?)
Posted by pgutwin at April 11, 2006 6:38 PM