For about half of Earth’s 4.6 billion-year existence, the atmosphere contained only carbon dioxide and nitrogen, with no oxygen. But this changed when cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, started producing the first oxygen using nitrogenase, which led to the Great Oxidation Event, fueling the evolution of life on Earth.
Today’s “Insomnia File” episode offers two stories of cosmic insight. The first is about ”An Accident More Complex than the Universe” from former astrophysicist and hard science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds, who’s epiphany is found in his novel , Blue Remembered Earth — first of a trilogy which follows humanity’s development over many centuries and Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine.
“The oldest traces of life are fossils of marine microbes dating back almost 3.5 billion years. It was in the oceans that multicellular organisms evolved; their oldest fossils date back to about 2 billion years ago,” observes Carl Zimmer in Planet of Viruses. “Microbes may be invisible to the naked eye,” he adds,”but collectively they dwarf all the ocean’s whales, its coral reefs, and all other forms of marine life.”
One of the great surprises of the twentieth century was the discovery of a universe driven by electric currents and punctuated by cosmic violence –from atomic particles to the largest galactic formations, a web of circuitry connects all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets and, on our blue planet, controlling weather and biological organisms.
Is evolution a gradual process, as Darwin believed, or can transnational change occur suddenly, in a violently brief time span, as suggested by Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould who argued in Ever Since Darwin that “the ‘sudden’ appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper prediction of evolutionary theory as we understand it. That ‘evolutionary ‘sequences’ are not rungs on a ladder, but our retrospective reconstruction of a circuitous path running like a labyrinth, branch to branch, from the base of the bush to a lineage now surviving at its top.”
“Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret?” asked scientist and philosopher Loren Eiseley with almost poetic, lyrical insight in The Immense Journey.
