From: thantos@yabbs
To: all@yabbs
Subject: re: Earth
Date: Tue Jul 26 07:46:46 1994

There is another way of looking at this subject which very few people seem 
willing or able to see.  Here's an excerpt from the book Jurassic Park 
which pretty much sums it all up.

Although most people believe that the planet is in jeopardy, it is not.

    Our planet is four and a half billion years old.  There has been life 
on this planet for nearly that long.  3.8 billion years.  The first 
bacteria.  And, later, the first multicellular animals, then the first 
complex creatures, in the sea, on the land.  Then the great sweeping ages 
of animals - the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting 
millions upon millions of years.  Great dynasties of creatures arising, 
flousishing, dying away.  All this happening against a background of 
continous and violent upheaval, mauntain ranges thrust up and eroded away, 
cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole 
continents moving... Endless and constand and violent change... Even 
today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two 
great continents colliding, buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range 
over millions of years.  The planet has survived everyting in its time.  
It will certainly survive us.

    "Just because it lasted a long time, doesn't mean it is permanent.  If 
there was a radiation accident..."

    Suppose there was.  Let's say we had a bad one, and all the plants and 
animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. 
Life would survive somewhere - under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic 
ice.  And after all those years, when the planet was no longer 
inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet.  The evolutionary 
process would begin again.  It might take a few billion years for life to 
regain its present variety.  And of course it would be very different from 
what it is now.  But the earth would survive our folly.  Life would 
survive our folly.  Only we, think it wouldn't.

    "Well, if the ozone layer gets thinner - "

    There would be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. 
So what?

    "Well, it'll cause skin cancer."

    Ultraviolet radiation is good for life.  It is powerful energy.  It 
promotes mutation, change.  Many forms of life will thrive with more UV 
radiation.

    "And many other will die out."

    You think this is the first time such a thing has happened?  Don't you 
know about oxygen?

    "I know that it is necessary for life."

    It is now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison.  It's a 
corrosive gase, like flouring, which is used to etch glass.  And when 
oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells - say 
around 3 billion years ago - it created a crisis for all other life on our 
planet.  Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly 
poison.  They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its 
concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen.  On 
earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly - five ten, 
eventually twenty-one percent.  Earthe had an atmosphere of pure poison! 
Incompatible with life!

    "So what is the point?  That modern pollutants will be incorporated 
too?"

    No.  The point is that life on earth can take care of itself.  In the 
thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time.  A hundred 
years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines... 
It was a whole different world.  But to the earth, a hundred years is 
nothing.  This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale.  We can't 
imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to 
try.  We have been residents here for the blink of an eye.  If we are gone 
tomorrow the earth will not miss us.

    "And we very well might be gone."

    Yes. We might.

    "So what are you saying? We shouldn't care about the environment?"

    No, ofcourse not.

    "Then what?"

    Let's be clear.  The planet is not in jeopardy.  We are in jepoardy.  
We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it.  But we 
might have the power to save ourselves.


Rather lengthy I will admitt, but I think it gets a point across.  Let's 
face it ....the planet's gonna survive with, or with out us.  The best we 
can do is to prolong it's livablility for our species.

Awaiting hate mail,

Thantos. o/o