Thread by @mikamckinnon

I see we’re back to “humans can’t destroy a PLANET” arguments.

Sure, cool, I agree: the actual physical planet will survive our shenanigans.

But us fragile humans? Yeah, we aren’t so tough. We can’t even survive all the ecosystems currently in play, much less amped up extremes.

Once upon a time, 1.8 to 3 billion years ago, wee lil cyanobacteria grew mats in warm, shallow, anoxic oceans. They basked in the sun, excreted like to create pretty layers of rock, breathed in Earth’s then-oxygen-poor atmosphere, and breathed out oxygen.

For a long, long time

These cyanobacteria — stromatolites — figured out oxygenic photosynthesis. Clever rock-algae-slime! Good job!

That steady infusion of oxygen by countless creatures reacted with iron in the oceans, precipitating out as banded iron formations (BIFs, my BFFs).

But it didn’t stop.

Tiny stromatolites, each mat made from millions of cyanobacteria growing short mushroom-shaped stumps of lime, kept producing oxygen.

More and more oxygen.

Oxygen that had no where to go & nothing to react with.

These lil stromatolites triggered the Great Oxygen Catastrophe.

From a human perspective, the Great Oxygen Catastrophe is more commonly the Great Oxygenation Event.

It was the onset of enough free oxygen in the atmosphere for all sorts of reactions, leading to an explosion in life forms and mineral evolution.

But not for stromatolites.

A few colonies of stromatolites adapted and survived.

The most famous are approximately a million hours north of Darwin in Shark Bay, Australia, although a few others exist in warm, salty, even-more inaccessible pools.

But most died.
Killed off by their own success.

I’m grateful to stromatolites.

I braved a blizzard to Saratoga Springs, NY, to dig fossilized stromatolites out of the snow to pet them and thank them for transforming our planet’s atmosphere into something I can survive. As far as I’m concerned, we owe them.

The planet survived the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. If you measure success by diversity (of life or rocks), it was far more successful afterwards.

But the stromatolites didn’t.

My ambition is simple:
I want humans to be more strategic than stromatolites.

I want us to survive.

We have big, complex brains capable of abstract thought.

We’ve developed cultures that enable us to share knowledge and coordinate actions.

We spent millennia refining the ability use observations about the world to link cause and effect.

We can do this.
It’s hard, but doable.

Maybe I’m cocky & have too much faith in humanity. I trained as a physicist; that comes with ego.

But I truly believe we’re capable as a species of surviving climate change. Not just the planet or life continuing, but us.

But we can’t be stromatolites passively awaiting doom.

Q: Pfft, we can just run off to another planet once we render Earth inhospitable to humans!

A: Earth is Easy Mode, always & forever. Everywhere else is harder to survive.

https://twitter.com/mikamckinnon/status/870370664321998848

Q: I don’t care about boring sustainability, green tech, or carbon policies. Flashy Rockets are where it’s at!

A: Space demands extreme sustainability. ISS makes coffee from processed pee. Want moon bases and humans on Mars? Upgrade reduce, reuse, recycle.

Fail here? Die there.

Errata: Mixed up my Aussie mining towns. That’s approximately a million hours north of *Perth; Darwin is north-coast.

(Related: Sydney, Perth, & Darwin are the only major Aussie cities I haven’t visited. Clearly I need to do I never repeat this error!)

Epilogue:
Here’s our planet just a few hours ago.

Here’s us in our thin layer of water & gas clinging to a ball of rock in the vastness of hard vacuum.

Here’s us, and the last of the stromatolites.

Here’s us in our fragility, to survive or die together.

https://twitter.com/dscovr_epic/status/1099731889106141184

Road trips with geoscientists, gently brushing snow off 490 million year fossilized stromatolites edition.