As I was walking through the forest yesterday it suddenly occurred to me why I love being in the wilderness. It's because nature doesn't lie. When we are in civilization we are bombarded with political, economic, and religious lies. So many facts are either twisted or blatantly false. But when I see a creek winding through a pathway of rocks I know it took millions of years for that formation to form. No one can tell me different. When I observe the lichen or smell the fresh soil I know it's truly real. I feel the moistness of the dirt in my hand and when I look closely I see that it's full of both dead and living organic material. As I hold the cold dirt and smell it, and feel it, I know that I'm alive.
Iron
But it wasn't always that way. In the early days following the Big Bang there were only gases, mainly hydrogen and helium. Stars formed and eventually exploded, and in the incredible heat of supernovas the heavy metals formed.
Our solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, which is part of a cluster called the Local Group that holds 54 galaxies. In turn, our group is part of the Lanaika supercluster, made up of about 100,000 galaxies. There are an estimated 10 million superclusters in the universe. These clusters are like swarms of lightning bugs, twirling around and spinning, and held together by gravity. The supercluster is a big place, measuring about 500 million lightyears across. Just our own local cluster is 10 million lightyears wide.
The point being is that being in this swarm, and in this giant gravitational dance, causes galaxies to pull together and collide. The resulting collision may seem catastrophic, but it's beautiful in that it's one of two ways that new stars are created. During the collision, the interstellar gases mix and are set on fire with the result of new star formations.
As stars explode and reconstitute into new stars their furnaces create the heavier metals on the Periodic Table. Iron is significant because none of us could live without it. It's the hemoglobin in our blood that transports the oxygen in our bodies and allows us to live. And inside the hemoglobin molecule is an iron atom that is able to bind with and carry the oxygen.
Oxygen
And what about the oxygen? At 3 billion years go there was little oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. We still had the same amount of nitrogen, but most of our atmosphere was made up of carbon dioxide. Hardly anything could live in those days except single celled organisms that mostly existed inside stromatolites. But then came a miracle — an organism formed that could use the energy of the sun to convert CO2 into oxygen. These organisms, called cyanobacteria, figured out photosynthesis and as these lifeforms filled the oceans our atmosphere slowly filled up with oxygen. As the oxygen rose into the upper atmosphere it was hit with radiation from the sun and formed ozone.
The creation of the ozone layer opened the way for higher lifeforms to develop and the geological record shows an explosion of life 600 million years ago, right after the ozone layer formed. Known as the Cambrian Explosion it was during this time that our oceans filled up with a massive array of sea life. What happened to those little cyanobacteria creatures that gave us life? They now live in plants as chloroplasts and contribute to a plant's photosynthesis.
Now think of those little cyanobacterias that faithfully oxygenated our planet. The little fellows were born, put a little O2 in the atmosphere, and then died. They had no idea that they were paving the way for billions of other animals to develop and live after them. They put some true goodness into our world.
Consciousness
One of the greatest mysteries of life is consciousness. No one really understands it, or why we even have it. But we can all agree that it's a great gift, but with it comes great responsibility. We can discern right from wrong and good from bad. It's incumbent upon each of us to use our consciousness for good. We can do this by doing the things that matter, like helping animals, each other, and taking care of the Earth. I assure you, NOTHING ELSE matters.
The capitalists and Ayn Rand tell us that we should give entrepreneurs free rein so that they can create the great inventions and innovations that make our lives better. I saw a video of a young girl, inspired by Ayn Rand's book, who wanted to cure cancer. Yet, entrepreneurs before her invented chemicals that do good things, yet created new types of cancer. This is a personal issue for me because my dad died from a cancer caused by a now outlawed herbicide.
I'm sure the guy who invented asbestos insulation thought he was doing a great thing for humanity, until it was realized that he simply gave thousands of people cancer. And then there was the agricultural revolution where scientists thought they would end world hunger. While their advanced farming techniques, machinery, and chemicals vastly improved farm output all that did was explode the world's population, and we still have 815 million undernourished people in the world.
What we need to do is determine what is real good in the world and and we need to better understand the unintended consequences of our technological contributions. The inventor of the combustion engine made life more convenient, but now we are filling the atmosphere up with CO2, and all the work of those cyanobacteria is going down the drain. Our human population explosion and massive resource consumption has caused a massive species extinction. We are exploding our species at the cost of millions of other species. We've destabilized our weather, which has led to droughts and wildfires, which have murdered billions of other animals. So, again, I say when you do good, do the good that really matters. Don't make starving children in Africa pray before you feed them, damnit, just FEED THEM.
Consciousness is awareness and one of our big advantages as humans is we learn from and benefit from all the people who lived before us and can take what they learned to the next level. In one way that's called the technology explosion, which may not turn out so great. What I'm really talking about is our social and internal growth. We now have laws to protect animals, which is a major step forward. Years ago it was a big step just to have laws that protected women, but we have them now. It's progress.
You have one life to live and when you are doing the real good you may not know who you are influencing or how your actions contribute to the overall good in the world. But while unintended consequences can go terribly bad, they can also result in exceptional good. We all should live a life that adds new songs and new colors to the world. We should provide a stepping stone that allows those after us to move higher up. We will likely never see the results of our good deeds, but in some small way we are moving the flow of our cultural stream in a better direction. You can serve on five committees at your church, you can be rich and have a nice house, but I assure you that the only thing that matters in this life is the selfless good that you contribute to our world. That is the meaning of life.
A thanks to Tom Chi and his TED talk for his inspiration and allowing me to put more of the puzzle together. This blog post is inspired by and dedicated to him, and I borrowed several of his concepts.
Primary Sources:
Everything is Connected — Here's How, by Tom Chi, TedxTaipei
What Sparked the Cambrian Explosion, Douglas Fox, Nature
Top Photo: Jon Flobrant Bottom Photo: Jake Thacker
