Welcome to Creature, future production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show Earth.
Is it a spaceship?
Is it a blue marble, a giant egg, a hologram projected by aliens? Or is it a living, breathing organism. We like to talk about individual inhabitants of the planet Earth, but what about the Earth itself? Can it function as a living entity? Joining me to discuss this question is writer for The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's.
The Atlantic, National Geographic and.
Scientific, and American and author of the new book Becoming.
Earth, How our Planet Came to Life. Welcome back to the show. Affairs Jaber, Welcome.
Thank you so much, pleasure to be here. Speak.
Last time we talked about birds, right, Yes.
The beautiful birds that inhabit our world.
I do love a good a good bird.
But I am so excited to have you back, especially to talk about your new book and also to talk about this concept of Earth, right being a living organism itself. Right, So when we think about Earth, feels like, okay, this is the substrate on which life is rocks and soil and stuff. What's up with rocks and dirt? Is that just dead inert stuff. That's just the basic building block of an Earth. That is this inert, floating asteroid that just so happens to have plants and animals on it.
Right exactly. So that's kind of been the predominant view in Western science for a long time. So you know, mainstream science tends to segregate the animates from the inanimate and.
To view animal mineral, vegetable.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, as you were saying, like, we tend to view the planet as kind of just the platform or the substrate for life, and life is the separate surface phenomenon that is on Earth. Right There countless books and textbooks and articles movies about life on Earth. But this alternative way of thinking, you know, says, but what if the Earth system, you know, what if the planet as a whole is also alive, is also a
form of life, not just a setting for life. And you know, this is an idea that I guess we shouldnow we should acknowledge that this idea itself is ancient, right, Like we find the basic concept of a living world in religions and mythologies all across the globe going way back in time, but in Western science it was popularized most by the Gaia hypothesis, introduced in the nineteen seventies by James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis, and they propose that
together life in the larger planetary environment form a single, self regulating living system. And it gets you know, it's really interesting because I do think it's important to kind of distinguish between Earth as a living entity versus other forms of life, like say so or organisms, because I do think historically there was this kind of conflation that's to say that Earth is alive means that Earth is an organism. But personally, I don't think that's quite right.
I think we should recognize life happening at multiple scales, you know, sell, organism, population, ecosystem, planet, and it's not identical in each of those manifestations, but it resembles itself very strongly. There are these really interesting echoes and rhymes between each scale.
That's really interesting.
I like that distinction because when we think about life, right it is I think a lot about how there's so many patterns right that we see reproduced on different scales. So like you said, say you look in an ant, and you look inside the ant, you see some kind of cellular biology that's happening in the ant. It's immune system maybe working very much like an ant colony in terms of defending the ant, this little tiny insect, and then you zoom out and you have this ant in
the ant itself is part of a call. And there's a lot of research into this idea of like emergence with an ant colony sort of ants acting as sort of individual parts of a larger I guess uh life form, which would be some kind of emergent intelligence coming out of this ant colony acting as an organism or something like.
Say you have certain types of slime molds, right that they have this individual life where they are these like little tiny unicellular organisms, and then they come together to form this, uh, this slug essentially that works and it seems to be like this one organism, right, a slug, and then it moves as if it's this one thing, and then it kind of like sprouts off this like weird little stem and little bulb on the end of it that produces these spores and then but then they're
on their own again, right, So there's these kind of interesting things where we see in nature this flexibility between the idea of like one or organism right where it's like a bird of fish, you or me, uh, and then also things where it's like there's a weird in between this of like sometimes it's like you have these individual parts that make up something that kind of acts as a one.
Life absolutely, you know, so all complex life forms are by definition intricate systems that are made of networked components, some of which are animate and some of which are inanimate. You know, we by weight are mostly water. You know, our skeletons are largely made of inert mineral, but we're also suffused with living cells. Actually you're asking earlier, you know about rock, like is rock alive? So one of Lovelock's favorite metaphors for Gaya for this concept of a
living planet was a giant redwood tree. So by you know, by volume, by mass, most of any mature tree is actually just dead tissue, and it's just laced and ringed with thin strips of living cells here and there. But nobody argues that a tree as a whole is not alive. You know, we all recognize a tree as alive, and you're saying it's similar for Earth. You know that the majority of the planet is inanimate to rock, but it has this incredible, flowering skin of life that sustains a
much larger, glowing, global being. And what's what's the interesting distinction though, is that you know what we call organisms are you know, they're members of species, and species are shaped by the process of natural selection and you know, and it's sort of standard evolution as we understand it. And that's where Earth, something at the scale of a planet, is different because it is not a member of the species.
It is not genetically reproducing with a single coherent genome, it's not competing with other planets, you know, for resources and such that, but it is inexorably bound up with the evolution of the organisms that comprise it. Right, So, once you understand that life, you know, is part of what Earth is. You know that life is this extension of the planet. So Earth is an inevitably composed and part of life. And then life loops back to dramatically
transformed a planetary environment. Then you see how Earth is bound up with the evolution of its smaller constituent life forms. So it is. It is evolving in a sense, it's just not the standard evolution by natural selection that we most typically.
Recognize, kind of a bottom up evolution where it's like within it's sort of like the organisms and life and individual components in Earth are driven by evolutionary pressures and then those kind of go up in terms of like shaping the earth.
Can you what are some examples of that though?
Like what does that mean for say, like, you know, I'm here, right, I can I can dig a hole in the earth there, I've shaped it. But big changes in the Earth, Like how do we see that happening in terms of organic life plants, animals actually shaping and changing the earth?
Right, So perhaps, you know, the single biggest transformation the Earth has undergone was a life powered revolution, and that was this long oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. You know, initially more than three four billion years ago, our atmosphere had essentially no oxygen in it whatsoever. It was very carbon and methane rich. It was probably a hazy orange smog, like, you know, a quality to it, possibly like the moon Titan around Saturn, or.
Like southern California and yeah, season yeah, or the unfortunate effects of some of the you know wildfires that many of us but it has been experiencing as well.
But yeah, those are those are yeah, kind of eerie glimpses into ancient Earth in some ways. But you know, two point five billion years ago, maybe a little bit earlier, these ocean plankton called cyanobacteria, they invented photosynthesis, and so they started pouring oxygen into the ocean and atmosphere, and very gradually over time, and then later with algae land plants, they raised the level of oxygen in the atmosphere from
essentially nothing to twenty thirty thirty five percent. Today it's about twenty one percent oxygen in the atmosphere in the carboniferous. When we had massive dragonflies, the sizes of pigeons, and the raging wildfires, it was more like thirty thirty five percent something like that. So it has fluctuated over time, and oxidating the atmosphere changed everything. Now you have a planet with a completely different chemistry. The sky shifted to
the blue part of the spectrum. Now fire is possible where it was not possible before, and without fire, human evolution would not have been what it was, So there are these amazing cascades of ecological changes, you know, through deep evolutionary time. And it all began with these single celled microbes in the ocean just doing their thing, photosynthesizing, and they ended up completely and permanently transforming the entire planet.
Do you know, like, if I'm an alien observing Earth during this change, like from the outside, does like that change in the atmosphere? Is that visually evident for me as like an alien in my little spaceship.
Yeah, that's a fantastic question because that was James Lovelock's initial insights when NASA asked him to help them find new ways of discovering alien life, and he was working at JPL in California, and he realized, you don't even have to go to another planet to detect if it has life on it. If there is life there, it will inevitably start changing the structure and chemistry of that planet. And life here on Earth has pushed our atmosphere into
chemical dysquilibrium. So just analyze the chemistry of the planet, you know, the atmosphere chemistry of the planet from afar, if it's a disequilibrium, the way that Earth is that's a very strong signal that there is life there. In contrast, our planetary siblings, Mars and Venus, their atmospheres are in chemical equilibrium. You know, we do not think there's any life there as far as we know. Maybe Mars had some microbial life at some point but over time died.
And that is what our atmosphere would look like if it was dictated purely by physics and not by biology.
Right, because it's the idea is that you have organisms on Earth taking energy like from the Sun and then having some kind of byproduct that is pushing that equilibrium off balance. Otherwise you would have some kind of in terms of the atmosphere, you'd have some kind of chemical equilibrium that's just solely determined by the physics of the planet exactly.
And I think that's a great way to think about it, is, you know, the ubiquity of life across Earth's surface is really it really is like this global entity or I've come to think of it as a planetary anatomy in physiology.
You know, all of these cells and living tissues spread across the planet is like Earth's anatomy and physiology and metabolism their collective behaviors, and so you know, scientists often think about the total photosynthetic productivity of the planet, not just of a single tree or even a forest, but the way that all this photosynthetic life is taking an energy from the Sun, transforming that energy, storing that energy. That is the chemical and energetic foundation of all of
the other life. Lynn Marglus like to say that, you know, the life we call Earth is this sun power emergent phenomenon, right. It is all dependent on the energy that we are bathed in from the Sun and it empowers these incredibly complex emergent phenomena that become a planetary scale force.
And in terms of the Earth, it's an interesting way to think of it because the Earth is not so like the planet itself right like it, it doesn't necessarily
have a like. As a human life form, I have a motivation which is staying alive and being happy, right essentially, which is I think more or less the motivation of most life forms on Earth, even if it's like technically it's like you want to reproduce and you want to be fit and stuff, But the actual emotional thing from me to like a mouse is like, I want to be alive and happy. But with a planet, there's not really a motivation, right, Like, like we were talking about,
there's no selective pressures on the planet itself coming from outside. Obviously, there are threats coming from outside, say like you know, asteroids, meteors, but like that's not something that the planet is particularly concerned with. But it's really all of these things that we're talking about in terms of things being good or bad, or or the transformations of the planet. Really all it
does is affect the individual components of it. So unlike a human body, where it's like I'm acutely aware of how my cells are functioning and I benefit from that as the larger organism, it's kind of the inverse with the planet because it's like the planet may be changing and being kind of alive as a you know, this giant unit, but the ones observing it and the ones you know benefiting from it are the individual units of like the planet.
Yeah, it's this, you know. This question of goal and purpose and motivation in biology has been a long debated subject, and it's interesting actually that recently we see more and more scientists and science writers kind of requestioning this historical resistance or reluctance to speak of any kind of goals or purpose in biology, you know, and kind of rethinking that a bit, but you're you're absolutely right that, you know, this problem of teleology of kind of goal driven processes
was a huge sticking point when the Guy hypothesis first came out, and one of the major reasons that most evolution and biologists really did not like this idea of Earth as a giant living thing. But another way to think about it is that all complex systems, even if they are not competing and reproducing the way that you know, Darwinian entities do, they are still competing against the basic
forces of time and entropy. You know, like the universe is always moving towards maximum entropy, where everything's just going to fall upon and dissolve into a homogeneous mush. But some systems find ways to persist longer than others, even if they're not reproducing and you know, carrying on a genetic legacy. They're persisting through time, like the Amazon rainforest.
This astonished me. The Amazon rainforest has endured for more than fifty million years, retaining its essential ecological characteristics and fundamental structural features that whole time. Yeah, so how do we account for that kind of you know, a large scale longevity that's happening at the scale of an ecosystem that spans a continent. That's incredible, and that's very close to what we see with the Earth system as a whole,
having endured for four point five billion years. I mean, that's so much time for something catastrophic to happen that completely annihilates all life and truly makes Earth a dead planet. And yet that hasn't happened yet. And not only has Earth survived these repeated catastrophes, it's arguably become more complex, more biodiverse over time. And I think, you know, some people might say it's luck, you know, that life's just hung on all this time. But I think part of
the answer is what we were talking about before. It's how how the planetary system is inevitably intertwined with the evolution and survival of its constituent life forms. The way I've come to think of it, you know, is living systems find ways to endure. They do something to keep themselves around that seems to be their defining quality. So wherever life emerges, it starts to do that or to
influence the larger environment. In a similar way, when you have life bound up in these larger environments, they often, you know, environment and life tend to converge upon processes and relationships and rhythms that ensure mutual persistence over long periods of time. I think that's the kind of thing that we're seeing with the Earth systems. So you're right, it's not the kind of homeostasis that has been shaped by natural selection the way we see organisms and species.
But because Earth is tied up with those organisms and species, we still see echoes of you know, of these emergent effects, you know, arising at the planetary scale. And yeah, it's just it's really incredible to think about that that, you know, when life takes hold in the right way on a planet, it can push it into this new complex state that
appears to have an amazing tenacity and resilience. Of course, the huge caveat is that we're always working with an end of one with Earth because it's the only living planet we've ever discovered, and we can't directly compare it to any other living planets.
Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of plenty of problems in terms of sample size in biology. I mean, yeah, even if you go smaller, say like with whales, impossibly, but you know it is it is very interesting, I wonder, like, so when we have this idea of life being integrated in this way where it is self sustaining, look at a very simple one, right like, predator prey relationship. We think of like sometimes it's this idea of like, well, the predator is taking advantage of the prey, right, exploiting
the prey. But actually, what's happening on and that may be happening within a single lifetime, but when you zoom out on to a scale of millions of years, the predators actually increasing the chance that this prey species, or
even the species that came from that prey species. Right, the predation itself is life sustaining because it is forcing these evolutionary changes in the prey species to become more fit, more flexible, have more genetic diversity, branch off into different species so that when you do have a shock, they're
more likely to survive. And of course the opposite, like, the same thing is true for predator species, right like, they are also shaped by the competition with the prey, right like, they face death as well if they are out competed by the prey in terms of starvation, being unable to find newttrition, so they undergo the same kind of pressures. And then, of course, like there's all sorts of like much more complicated relationships between animals than just predator prey.
You have parasites, you have.
Pathogens, you have mutualistic you have competitive and all of these kinds of relationships seem to, like you said, because there's pressures, and because there is this pushing for biodiversity, for genetic diversity, for different types of evolutionary strategies, it does make it much more likely that if you have a shock, right like a meteor strike, life can go on, whereas if you had it much more sort of homeostasis in terms of there's no change, there's no competition, there's
no sort of evolutionary pressures than if you only have a few types of animals going around and they endure this shock, or not just animals but plants or microorganisms, and then you have a shock much less likely to be able to endure it.
So I find that very interesting.
You raise a really good point, because I think we're seeing a renewed emphasis on this concept of co evolution, you know, and sort of recognizing and appreciating the reciprocity that exists in evolutionary processes. So the classic example is plants and pollinators, right that they have shaped each other. You have insects and other animals, you know, evolving adaptations that help them gain floral sustenance. And then you have flowering plants evolving all of these bright colors and invisible
patterns that we can't see that are attracting pollinators. They're shaping each other. But life and environment do the same thing. That's what's kind of come into the forefront now is that this coevolutionary process happens between organisms and their environments
as well. That organisms are continually changing their environments at the same time that they are adapting to them, and then that can have astonishing repercussions, you know, kind of ripple effects through evolutionary time because once you know, organisms have changed the environment in which they're descending descendants are evolving,
they've changed the future revolution of their own species. So and like we've talked about this before with birds and bees, they're becoming agents, they're becoming active participants in their own evolution.
Yeah, it's like a kind of self feedback loop, which is really interesting. What's like an interesting example of that, say, like a species really shaping the environment and then their future progeny, right like adapting to that new environment that they have shaped.
So another another fascinating example is the so called Cambrian substrate revolution, which happened maybe somewhere between five hundred and four hundred million years ago. So back then, you know, much of the sea floor was covered by this thick microbial mat. There's a very anoxic environment beneath it, and there were these weird slug like organisms that we don't
even know how to classify, you know, oozing along. And then the Cambrian explosion happened, and you have these incredible diversity of giant shrimps and beetle like animals with teeth and jaws and spine all their yeah, yeah, exactly, all those like the hallucgety and like the truly trippy creatures of the Cabrian And they started tearing up the microbial mat and you know, the scientists call it bioturbation, and they compare it to when the settlers came in and
tore up the prairies, you know, for agriculture in North America, So they massively disrupted this initial ancient ocean ecosystem. But in doing so, they allowed oxygen, water, and nutrients to penetrate the seafloor and the way they could not before, and they created all these new niches that you know, new species can now evolve to occupy. So in the long term, this animal powered revolution dramatically diversified the ocean ecosystem.
It made it much more habitable overall. And now these microbial mats exist only in a few rare places where there's very low oxygen, and most of the seafloor you know, is much more widely hapbited than it used to be, so that you know, it's a pretty powerful example of life coming in transforming the structure the geology of the planet, and then that loops back to allow new evolutionary possibilities.
Yeah, that's that's very interesting.
I mean, I think that sometimes we think of destruction as a negative thing, right, Like you have a species come in and it destroys the sort of like existing peace and tranquility of what's going on there, and then it's seemed like, oh, you know, they're destroying like sort of like the example you have in terms of like maybe like settlers coming in and like, you know, devastating an ecosystem. But in terms of like that long view
of evolutionary history, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I think the reason why it feels bad is that when we're looking in the short term, especially in terms of humans, because we are uniquely good at doing big things in short periods of time, which is you know, actually not potentially good, right, Like, you know, there are things like it's I'm not saying that it doesn't matter what humans do, life on Earth will inevitably survive no matter what.
I think.
There's a good chance it will. But you know, there are definite things that we can do to sabotage the Earth's health. In the long term, there is, at least in terms of this very very long perspective of evolution, there's a lot of positive things that come from death. And one of the things that I like that you mentioned in your book that is really fun to me is that like so much of the Earth is like skeletons,
like we are living. I mean, maybe it sounds a little bit dark or metal, whatever your perspective is, but like we are living on so many skeletons of dead things that becomes structures for us to live on or to inhabit, or to for things to grow on. So can you talk about, like, how much of the earth do you think is like skeletons of dead things that we are now like living on?
Right? Yeah, you know, one of the moments that really transform my thinking that I'll never forget is when I love and that the White Cliffs of Dover, this massive chalk formation, is composed, you know, almost entirely of the remains of ancient ocean creatures, and mostly single celled ocean creatures.
So if you take a little piece of chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover and you look at it under a powerful microscope, you see these really intricate, little like bone like pegs all packed together like the stones in an archway. Those are the degraded remains of the intricate exoskeletons of plankton called cocolythophores, you know, that build these chalky, beautiful casings for themselves, and they live there.
You know, sixty five million years ago they died, they sank to the seafloor, they collected in sediments and over time, those sediments compacted and turned into stone that was subducted, you know, into the Earth's crustin nantle and recycled. And then you know, in this particular case, shrinking sea levels exposed, you know, this massive accumulation of petrified set and that
is the White Cliffs of Dover. And in fact, the majority of limestone formations around the planet are made of the remains of ancient sea creatures, which means that everything we've made from limestone, like the Pyramids of Giza, the Washington Monument, the Colisseum, are also these secret monuments to ancient ocean planton and sea life. So that totally blew
my mind. And you're absolutely right that so much of the planet is made of the remains of life, or was made by life, or was influenced by life in some way, and a lot of it, you know, is kind of like simultaneously graveyard and nursery, Like it's it's the cemetery of ancient life, but it's also supporting and nourishing, you know, the new generations and waves of life. And of course that's also kind of what we're doing with fossil fuels. Like if you really want to think about
it in an Earth's system science sense. What are we doing when we you know, power our cars and everything with gas. We are unearthing ancient stores of life that have accumulated, you know, millions of years of sunlighte burning them, combusting them to power our civilization, and then releasing their carbon to the atmosphere, whereas with the typical Earth system, you know, they would have remained sequestered in the crust
for a long, long, long period of time. And so understanding that, you know, this reciprocity between the geology and biology, between carbon and life, and how we come in and as you said, in a geological blink, in just a few centuries, so much faster than any other species, completely transform all of these planetary scale cycles. And we now emit more carbon, sixty to one hundred and twenty times more carbon than all the volcanoes on the planet combined.
You know, we are not just equal to volcanic power. We're like many many, many times the power of volcanoes, which really puts things in perspective.
Yeah, it really is the time scale. I think that is important because all like I think people often say, like, well, all the things that humans do, right, it's stuff that
other species do. We try we you know, consume things, we try to reach produce, we try to be successful, we innovate, and sure we destroy things, but that that's something that species throughout time have done and there have been extinctions throughout time, and it's fine, the earth goes on, things adapt, but it really is the the scary part
is the exponential speed at which we do it. Right, Like I think of it in terms of when you when if we think of the planet as as alive, right when you have something like a some there's a lot of bacteria you can have in your body and it's fine, and they're actually they can actually be good. Some are kind of bad for you, but your immune system can deal with it. Some you know, it's like some can be good for you up to a certain point, and then if there's a little too much then it
can start to be bad for you. There's all these like balances. But if you have something like necrotizing fasciitis, which is an extremely fast growing bacteria, it's the speed at this exponential growth of a bacteria that is destroying your body and it can kill you. So it's like that's not to be so me like, I'm not a misanthrope. I do not hate humankind being a member of it.
But you know, in terms of our actions, right, like, it is the rate at which we cause these problems that is really kind of the main issue, because we're it is the scale of introducing these new balance of chemistry to the atmosphere or extracting these sequestered energy stores, and then you know, of course like warming the planet, which which causes all these other externalities things like the permafrost melting, and then releasing even more stored biomass, which
can if that like if that further degrades, that also releases things like methane.
And so it's just like there.
Are all of these processes that we've sped up to such a degree that it is it's that that kind of creepy speed at which we can or I should say, like unc any speed out which we can, as you know, take these like very very long term processes and be like what if we burn it all within a few decades.
Absolutely, I think you're exactly right. You know, I've come to think of it as the combined speed and scale of what our species has done is what is so unprecedented.
And I talked to some scientists about this, and you know, it's difficult to say definitively because there's so much about ancient Earth history we can't know for sure, but it is plausible that in the entirety of four point five four billion years Earth history, there has never been this particular volume of carbon released to the atmosphere this quickly, which would make us not just biologically but geologically unique in Earth history, you.
Know, one I know, right.
So another horribly amazing example of this is plastic pollution, because you know, you go back, yeah, like we go back before nineteen fifty, plastic did not exist in any significant quantity on this planet. Now it is so ubiquitous that it is. It is horrifyingly ubiquitous. You know, we find it in the clouds, in the deepest ocean trenches, in our blood and our lungs. You know, in every ecosystem we've looked in, these micro particles of plastic are there.
And that is something that we have done in a matter of decades. I mean, that is truly astonishing, you know, like life has repeatedly produced these new waste products or byproducts, and then the whole Earth system has to deal with. But that typically happens over an immense period of time, not just in a few decades.
And that time skit.
Why that's so important is that evolution for many organisms, many organisms, some can work very fast, like viruses, bacteria, they can evolve quite quickly. But for larger organisms, for larger plants, it is it is difficult to adapt to changes that happen extremely quickly. There can be too like get you know, if the skin if it's a fast change, but the scale of it is limited. Yes, it can happen.
I mean, obviously we've seen catastrophic events, mass extinctions throughout the planet's history that have still been survivable in terms of all the you know, like life does continue.
But yeah, it is.
It is spooky to me the speed at which we have been introducing these changes. I have become unfortunately very attuned to news about microplastics now, and it is it is, it's pretty creepy. It's like to the point where I'm like, can I get milk and glass bottles?
Is that a thing anymore?
I know?
I know that, Like it's funny because it's like it is so ubiquitous at this point, Like me being anxious about getting milk and plastic bottles is not not the scale at which I need to be worried about things, but it is still it is still kind of like, you know, amazing in a way that is upsetting in terms of like we now we're just now being like, oh, we like within just a few decades, which is nothing
in terms of the planet's history. That is like, that is like a blip, a tiny blip on the evolutionary scale.
We have somehow managed to get plastics in everything, and we don't know what that means, right, We don't know if that's completely inert, which I kind of doubt, or and then if it is not inert, what that actually does, because it's like not just microplastics now, it's like, oh, there's even smaller pieces called nanoplastics, right, because if the plastic little particles are big enough, the ideas like, well, maybe they don't interfere too much with biological processes, but
if they're small enough, for sure that can interfere with like cellular processes.
And yeah, it is it is a little.
Spooky that that's, you know, which we have introduced an entirely new, you know, molecule that is ubiquitous everywhere, which is like plastics everywhere, different kinds too, definitely, And.
Like you're saying it's such a new phenomenon, you know that there's so much we don't know, Like so much what we've learned about how plastic warps biological organisms as individuals and then ecosystems as a whole is already alarming enough, but then there's so many mysteries to resolve, Like the majority of plastic pollution in the ocean is just is bizarrely missing, like we don't know where it is, Like we these tiny particles have just like there should be
a lot more of them based on our calculations, and we can't find them. We don't know are they being somewhere, Yeah, are they buried in deep sentiments? Have like some sort of life form eating them that we're not finding. Where did they go?
Hopefully?
Yeah, if something, if there's like a because like you know, every I feel like every month, I'm like, oh, there's a news article about bacteria that can eat plastic, Like.
Why is this not?
Like and then but it just it's sort of the old canard of like you read every month about like how they've cured every disease in mice, and it's like, okay, then when is that actually going to be applied? But yeah, I mean I am that is the other thing, right, Like, if there is any candidate to be able to adapt that quickly to our incredibly rapid rate of change, it
could be like microbial organisms like bacteria. I mean, viruses are interesting because we see them as such a bad thing and maybe not even life.
Right.
There's so much like disagreement over whether viruses count as live, right, because they're they're such a unique right, kind of like organism. But you know, nevertheless, these like these things that have incredible rates of reproduction and short lifespans are the ones that may be able to better adapt to, say like our sudden influx of plastics. But on the other hand, they are also dependent on macro organisms.
Yeah, and you're absolutely right that, you know, microbes and fungi are the ones that we are seeing potentially so to adapt to plastics presence and learn how to break
it down. And of course that's now generating interest and know, can we use them in some way, you know, to accelerate the breakdown of plastic And then of course you run into you know what we could call the cane toad problem, you know, where like you try to introduce something, some organism, er species to some you know, ecosystem where it wasn't before, and it leads to all these unintended consequences.
And I found this. There's actually a science fiction novel from the seventies, I think, in which the time for so they engineer microbes to eat plastic and then the microbes kind of escape and go wild, and planes start dissolving in the you know, mid air, and think everything starts falling apart because all these plastic infrastructure is being you know, eaten by these renegade microbes. So that sort of you know, unintended consequences is the is the concern
there as well. But yeah, it's like you're saying, you know, in the long long run, I'm not concerned about the ear system as a whole, because it has demonstrated this incredible resiliency. You know, Earth will it app as a system and life will rebound as a whole. But what we are, we are, you know, what we're worried about is our way of life, our particular version of Earth that we have enjoyed, or that we have helped create. That is what we are rapidly destroying. And it won't
just be us that you know, will suffer. It's countless of non human species as well. You know, their ecosystems are also going to collapse. You know, their ways of
life are also going to fall apart. So that's what we're trying to prevent, you know, is not you know, not annihilating the living Earth as a whole, but preventing it from becoming unrecognizable because it's there have been so many different earths throughout Earth history, so many versions of our planet, and we're trying to prevent us from going into a version that is is not only unrecognizable to us, but one that cannot sustain the way that we live anymore.
But so one thing I'm interested is, like, when you're looking at organisms shaping the Earth, do you.
Think that like it is?
Is it the microorganisms that are doing the heavy lifting in terms of changing the earth or our macro organisms also pretty good? I mean, let's maybe let's just like humans aside, because obviously humans we are experts at doing this, right, like we rival cyanobacteria and our ability to completely transform the earth. But like if we ignore humans for now, Like, do you think it is the microorganisms or the macro organisms that do most of the legwork in terms of shaping the planet.
I think we have to give microbes a lot of credit. I think of them as kind of handling the fundamentals, you know, laying the groundwork for everything else. Because for more than two billion years our planet was exclusively microbial. There was no complex, multi failure life to speak of. And it was you know, cyanobacteria microbes that began the oxygenation of Earth, but then it was later continued by allergy and land plants, so you see a kind of
you know, a partnership or concerted effort there. So, you know, microbes, they oxygenated the planet largely, they revolutionize the chemistry. They may have played a role in the formation of the continents. They seem to calibrate ocean chemistry to some extent. They're
really you know, handling those fundamentals. But large you know, mega like a macro scale organisms that are playing a really important role too, in particular animals, because they are the most dynamic living elements, the most mobile and dynamic living elements in the Earth system, and they are really important for nutrient cycles. So in addition to kind of physically re sculpting the crust all the time, they are keeping carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus, all these elements we
depend on to live. They're cycling them through the planet's layers. You know, they're cycling them from land to sea and back again. And you know, so everything from whales to jellyfish, to eagles to bears to otters, they're participating in these nutrient cycles in a very important way. And this concept is now known as zoo geochemistry that we have to you know, put animals right back in the center of these nutrient cycles and not just see it as purely
geological or geochemical cycles. And so it's you know, it's really everything together. Like the present Earth system really depends on everything, Like it's the microbes and the fungi and the plants and the animals. You could have an Earth that is purely microbial, as we did before, but it would not be the Earth.
That we know, No, certainly, not unless unless we could get real tiny yeah no, but what would be So like when you're talking about these nutrient cycles, right like basically.
Taking these these.
Elements and moving them from uh, maybe from the sea to terrestrial land or to the atmosphere, Like what what would that look like like? For so for an otter to help out with this sort of uh, this distribution system, like what what is the otter doing?
Right? So it always begins with terrestrial plants helping to break down the crust and the rocks of the planet, which then flushes minerals and nutrients to the ocean in rivers. Those nutrients and minerals nourish ocean life like plankton, which then you know, feed the entire rest of the ocean
food system of food web. And then you have some fish, for example, will migrate from the ocean back to the land, you know, back to rivers and lakes, and that's where things like bears or otters are going to catch those fish that are bringing the nutrients back to the land.
And then you might have some bears or otters something leave a fish carcass, you know, on the shore somewhere, and now those nutrients are going to go back into the soil and feed the terrestrial plant life that began that whole cycle in the first place.
It's so cool, Yeah, it is very like when you think about these things. It's like all of Earth is just a giant game of very complicated ping pong ball. What's uh, what is something that like while you were writing and researching this book, Is there something that you learned that like really shocked you in the In the writing of this book.
I was particularly fascinated by the co evolutionary braid between plant life, oxygen, and fire. So fire plays this fascinating role in the Earth system. And you know, as we were talking about, before before life oxigenated the atmosphere, fire was not possible. There were no wildfires. But also you need dry combustible matter to burn, which did not exist
before lands, you know, significantly populated the continents. So the birth of fire, as we understand it didn't really happen until something like four hundred and twenty million years ago, you know, which is not that much of earth history, right, But since then has been hugely important for you know, Earth as we recognize it, because plants and fire have continually co evolved with each other and have shaped each other.
And you know, scientists and writers talk about fire kind of being embedded in the biology of the planet and these fire regimes, these patterns and frequency of wildfires in particular, ecosystems evolve with those ecosystems, and so for a long time the level of oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuated wildly.
But in the past fifty million years has been remarkably stable compared to the ancient past, hovering around twenty one percent where it is today, and scientists now think that maybe the explanation for that is this coevolution of plant life, fire and oxygen. And the basic idea here is that, you know, if the level of oxygen gets too high, it's going to stimulate and foster these massive, raging wildfires that are going to burn down huge tracts of vegetation.
By doing that, they actually weaken the very mechanism by which oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere, because it's only the continual burial of photosynthetic matter that allows oxygen to accumulate. So fires burn down a lot of plants, oxygen starts to dip back down again, and that is this negative or stabilizing feedback on the level of oxygen that perhaps keeps it in a zone where it allows an immense
you know, diversity of fire adapted life to exist. But it doesn't go so high that a single spark would turn the entire planet into a fireball, you know. So
it's keeping it in that more habitable zone. And we see these kinds of fascinating feedbacks you know, throughout the Earth system, and that's entirely what not only our civilization but all our ecosystems depend on is remaining within these boundaries, you know, and they're pretty narrow compared to where the Earth has been in the past, Like there have been times where we had a snowball or a slushball Earth where like most of the Earth was covered in ice,
you know, or times where the Earth was in an extreme hothouse state with an average temperature much much higher than it is today and you had crocodiles and palm trees like in the Arctic regions. So you know, we are part of what we are engaged in right now is trying to keep Earth within that much narrower habitable climate zone.
Right Sadly, it means we don't get to have giant bugs, but you know, right I want I want those pigeon sized dragonflies.
I think they It's funny. Most people I tell about that are like immediately repulse, but you and I are like, no, we want.
Cash. Yeah, I can you man, just like having having a pet. I don't know, a little a weavil, a pet weavil.
Really literally And you say that. I just told my partners the other day. You know in a Nausica of the Valley of the Wind that me is Zaki movie. She has that incredible yeah yeah, she has like that old fox like creature. And I was like, what if somebody had like a dragonfly, you know.
Giant That's gonna be like if I if I write like a pirate fantasy, it's gonna be a high oxygen environment. And they've got instead of parrots, they've got giant dragonflies.
Right.
I love that movie. By the way, You show me.
A giant bug and I'm happy. Yeah, I'm easy, easy to please. Before we go, we do got to play a little game. It's called Guess who squawk on the Mystery Animal Sound Game.
Every week I select.
A mystery animal sound and you the listener, and you the guests, try to guess who is making that sound. So the hint for this week's sound is is this is it a cat or a noodle?
All Right? You got any guesses?
Wow, that's fascinating. So it does. It did immediately remind me of some of the noises I've heard my cats make in the past. You know, something like that that shittering they do when they see a flying creature. Oh, yeah, sometimes, and.
I had a cat who would do that.
Yeah, and the exactly and muling and such. Wait when you say, is it a cat, you say? Or a noodle like?
Or a noodle?
Yeah, or a noodle like a danger noodle.
Lots of different types of noodles. Also, there's so many types.
It also, Oh, you know what. It also reminds me. I've seen this clip of a sleeping hummingbird that is snoring.
I've seen that. I've seen that.
Similar to that.
That is, I've seen that video. It is the cutest thing. It's I will give you another hint. It's not that that's an excellent idea. I'm going to spring that that mystery sound on you guys. One of these days you're going to get a snoozing hummingbird, but you won't know when it's coming. All right, So you got got any more guesses or you want me to reveal.
Yeah, let's uh. If you have one more hints, I'll take one or we can just do the reveal it is.
It is not a cat or a noodle, but somehow it's both at the same time. And it is something that uh is, let's see, although it is in the peliform suborder.
Interesting. Okay, so something cat like? M okay, what is it? I give up?
It is a genet.
Oh.
They are closely related to civets and actually the binterong, which is a whole other thing on its own, much more closely related to genets than they are too wild or domesticated cats.
But they look very cat like.
They are this long spotted, they have a bit I guess a pointier face than a cat. They kind of look like a weasel and a cat had a spotty, large baby. So there are multiple species of Genant, all of whom originate from Africa. The common genant was actually in produced to Europe around a thousand years ago, so it can still be found in some parts of Europe.
They are omnivorous and they will eat small vertebrates, including fish in species who live near water, They'll eat insects, invertebrates, fruits, vegetation, pretty much anything that they can get their little mouths on. Sometimes you do see them as pets in the exotic
pet trade. I would very much advise against this, not only because of the obvious issues in terms of the pet trade, which can be quite bad for populations of wild animals, it's also just like they are really really hard to keep fed, have a good diet because they're so omnivorous, Because they have such a very diet, to recreate that in captivity or in sort of a pet situation would be really hard, really challenging, so it's not going to be having a very healthy life as a pet.
They're also really stinky and unfriendly. So other than the appeal that people have in terms of exotic pets being like unique most exotic pets, the reason that they're not they have not become common domesticated pets is because they're stinky and unfriendly. So onto this week's mystery animal sound.
This is the hint.
These guys are free living exterminators.
I did you hear that little like? Yeah, got any guesses?
That sounds that sounds very tropical rainforesty to me, and it's making me think of maybe a bug eating small primate or some sort of light tree living or gliding rodent like a flying squirrel or something of something small. The may furry mammalian bug eating creature something of that relph.
Small bug eating possibly mammalion. Well, I will reveal the answer on the next episode of Creature Feature. Farris, thank you so much for joining me today. Tell the people where they can get your book, what it's called, and where else they can read your stuff.
Thank you for having me. It's all. It's a pleasure as always. So. The book's called The Coming Earth, How Our Planet Came to Life. It's out from Random House. It should be available anywhere online you buy books, and of course at your local favorite bookstore. You can read most of my work in the New York Times magazine, and you can find more of my writing at my website. Is just my name, Farris jaberjabr dot com.
Excellent. Yeah, well, I'm so happy to have you back on the show.
This is really fun, and thank you guys so much for listening.
If you're enjoying the show.
And you leave a rating and review, that actually helps me and I read all of them. If you even just do a review, that's like, Hi, Katie, I have a question and I'll read it and maybe answer it on the show. Also, if you'd prefer to just email me your questions, you can do so at creaturefutureplod at gmail dot com, where I will either try to answer your question directly through your email, or I do listener questions episodes every so often and your questions are greatly appreciated.
Or you know, send me pictures of your pets. That's always fun.
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