Who is saving who?

This week’s weird idea

Here’s the numbers I think of whenever I hear the phrase “we have to save the Earth:”

One billion

That’s how many years that the Earth can sustain life before the sun gets too big and old and cranky and kills everything off.

10 to 50 million

That’s how long it takes for the current surface of the Earth to be shoved underground by plate tectonics like the world’s biggest, slowest conveyor belt, and get replaced with brand surface brought up from the mantle. Any pollutants get recycled down in the deep magma.

So the Earth will make itself a new crust anywhere from 20 to 100 times before that sun makes it all pointless.

2

That’s how many miles down that scientists have found multicellular life in the rock itself. Heat? Pressure? Low oxygen? No problem for these organisms. And two miles of rock is a pretty good barrier against whatever nonsense goes on in the surface.

600 million to 1.5 billion

That’s how long it took life to evolve from multicellular life to humans. All the way from just clumps of cells in the ocean to little furry critters. Yes, it’s a big spread on the numbers, but clumps of cells are really bad at leaving behind fossils, so it hard to pin them down.

By contrast, it took two to three times longer to get just from single-celled life to the multicellular. Once life starting using more than one cell, things really took off. So that multicellular life underground will give evolution a real head-start.

Which means

Even if the unthinkable happened and we completely poisoned, irradiated, and/or covered the planet in concrete, even if we kill all life on the surface and the oceans, plate tectonics will shove all that human mess underground within about 50 million years.

That same plate tectonic action will bring that 2-mile deep life-bearing rock to the surface, where the underground organisms will find a land full of oxygen and sunlight. And life on Earth loves that stuff.

And with 1 billion years left for those underground critters to get busy evolving, there’s plenty of time to repeat the 600 million to 1.5 billion evolutionary experiment of intelligent life. It’s just won’t look like us. At all.

So do we need to save the Earth? Not really. The Earth has its own contingency plans. The Earth is ready to play the long game. The Earth can get along fine without us. We, on the other hand, are completely dependent on it.

Who we really need to save is ourselves—by saving the Earth’s ability to keep us alive.

Have a listen

Have I linked to “Tank" before? Doesn’t matter, more “Tank" is always good. There’s an extended version that packs in even more coolness if you like this:

Take a look

Yes, this is a long video. Please watch at least the very beginning, where you can hear the most adorable little sonic boom ever. Go get ‘em, trebuchet guy!

Supersonic Trebuchet

Ok so when you woke up this morning, you probably didn’t expect to watch a 20-minute video about a trebuchet — but to be fair, I didn’t either. But Tom Stan

kottke.orgJason Kottke

And keep breathing

One of the things that got me thinking about consciously breathing was this book by James Nestor:

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

THE MILLION COPY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, FEATURING NEW MATERIAL”I highly recommend this book.” —Wim Hof“A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert”This book is amazing. “ —Joe RoganNo matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly.There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

Riverhead BooksJames Nestor

And holy carp is it a deep dive. A thoroughly entertaining writer, Nestor really experiences things first-hand, including participating in a study where he plugged his nose shut and breathed only through his mouth for ten days (spoiler: don’t do this, it’s tremendously unhealthy).

So keep breathing. With your nose and everything.

Until we talk again, I remain,

Your pal,

Jamie