“ Nothing is lasting , ” state the great philosopher Heraclitus , “ except variety . ” Tonight ’s episode of Cosmos was about the changes the Earth has undergo over the eons and the share life has made to those changes .
The story starts about three hundred million years ago , on December 23rd of the Cosmic Year , when Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree first appear on the Earth thanks to a miracle molecule known as lignin . Lignin was strong and flexible and give trees the ability to grow tall than any life manakin before or since . Lignin was also indigestible to the agents of decay , the bacteria and fungus that fed off dead plants and animals .
And so trees flourished for millions of years , perpetrate atomic number 6 dioxide out of the gentle wind and release O . Trees exhaust so much oxygen that they radically change the climate of the Earth , allowing insects to grow to massive sizing . Without a mechanism for decay , the carbon copy in the tree became sequestered in the ground and converted into ember which establish up until it was was eventually sting in volcanoes and released into the ambience as carbon dioxide . This departure created a runaway greenhouse case cognise as the Permian - Triassic experimental extinction which wipe out most of the life on Earth .
Tyson then turns his attention to the Earth ’s architectonic force and the uncovering of continental drift by Alfred Wegener , who died on an expedition still the topic of derision by his contemporaries who preferred irregular land bridge theories to explicate the appearance of indistinguishable fossils on continents split up by oceans . Scientists , Tyson tells us , are human beings , with the same preconception and flawed judgment all humans share .
Science is a mechanics for ferret out out those biases , but it is far from perfect . Sometimes finish that seem obvious in retrospect expression years of denial by even the most well meaning of scientists too inured to their assumptions to see the evidence understandably . And so with the evidence of the Permian experimental extinction sitting right before our eye , Tyson ends with a supplication for the ingenuity and courage to exempt ourselves from our carbon addiction .
In the global warming public debate , the fictitious choice is normally lay out that since the mood changed by nature in the past we can safely close that human being are not bestow to climate alteration now . Lightning causes timberland fire , therefore humans do not . In this episode of Cosmos , we see that we can not so easily separate life from the Earth ’s other natural processes . If we are not lead to globose warming , it will be the first metre biological activity on the scale of human civilization has not affect the climate .
Another argument that is commonly made is that the Earth is undergoing natural warming , an interglacial full point between ice age , and that this can report for the warming we ’ve seen in the mood . This is , of course , also a false choice . At the same fourth dimension that the Earth is warm up by nature due to variations in our orbit , we are also dig up and burning more of the ancient sequestered carbon than at any time since the Permian - Triassic result . That the Earth is warming on its own does n’t make our part to spherical warming less dangerous . It make it more grave , like cast on a perspirer while running a febrility .
If the history of Earth ’s violent climatic upheavals tells us anything , it ’s that the planet does not deal whether we survive or die . extinguishing upon extinction upon extinction has shown us that if we require to conserve this place as our base , the onus is on us to understand how and why the climate work the way it does . No one is going to pull our bacon out of the fire except us .
Or , in the word of another great philosopher , George Carlin , “ the planet is fine … the people are fucked . ”
The good news ? Cosmoshad its best military rating in a couple month last night , including a full-grown jump among the key demographic . And this show is sustain an impact that goes beyond viewer , as Carolyn Porco explains :
The last 2#Cosmosepisodes actually made me reckon at myself differently . As a woman scientist , I am part of a fine & stately line . So majestic !
— Carolyn Porco ( @carolynporco)May 5 , 2014
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