Month: September 2022

ENDLESS RECONFIGURATION. “Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes. Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry.” (Brian Arthur). https://lnkd.in/dhVUUSY View in LinkedIn

JOINED AT THE HIP. "Technological Evolution is Cultural Evolution. However, technology’s desires are not dictates. Perhaps what we fear most about technology is ourselves. For better or worse, technology’s evolution and our own are inseparable." https://lnkd.in/dZh-rjw View in LinkedIn

IN PERSPECTIVE. "In his Cosmic Calendar, with each month representing slightly over one billion years, Sagan dated the major events during the first 11 months of the cosmic year. Basically, humans are just the new kids in the block, and only evolved late at night on the last day of this Cosmic Calendar." https://lnkd.in/dTveM5M View in LinkedIn

FINAL PRODUCT? "Considering that Homo Sapiens is a very, very recent invention in biological evolution, we as humans are naive if we believe we are the end product of evolution. I’m sure we are not. So there's certainly something to think about. It’s likely that we’ll help create the next major evolutionary step." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE focuses on a part of Earth’s violent history called the Great Unconformity. This wax the pre-Cambrian period when 3-5 VERTICAL KILOMETERS got erased from the surface of the globe. Geologists argue whether it was due to the persistent glaciation of Snowball Earth, or whether then melting ice caused a massive flood, or a combination of both. Either way, it single-handedly could explain the missing fossil history and the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian explosion. It seems that this truly epic story has been buried in obtuse geology writings and that biologists have paid it scant attention. View in LinkedIn

THE GREAT UNCONFORMITY seems to have occurred in north and south America, India and China, at the very least, in the same time period. It resulted in enormous quantities of the sedimentary rocks being dumped into the world’s oceans and sucked into subduction zones to be recycled in the Earth’s core, taking with it fossil records that are usually laid down as an orderly permanent record. No other event in Earth’s history was of such an enormous scale, excepting the period of extreme meteorite bombardment. View in LinkedIn

DARWIN’S PROBLEM. “The apparent absence of a fossil record prior to the appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian famously troubled Darwin. He wrote in On the Origin of Species that if his theory of evolution were true “it is indisputable that before the lowest [Cambrian] stratum was deposited … the world swarmed with living creatures.” Furthermore, he could give “no satisfactory answer” as to why older fossiliferous deposits had not been found.” https://lnkd.in/d8SyHX7 View in LinkedIn

THE FIRST OBSERVATIONS. “Of the many unconformities (gaps) observed in geological strata, the term Great Unconformity is applied to either the unconformity observed by James Hutton in 1787 at Siccar Point in Scotland, or that observed by John Wesley Powell in the Grand Canyon in 1869. Both instances are exceptional examples of where the contacts between sedimentary strata and either sedimentary or crystalline strata of greatly different ages, origins, and structure represent periods of geologic time sufficiently long to raise great mountains and then erode them away.” https://lnkd.in/djabPdZ View in LinkedIn

ONE FIFTH OF HISTORY RIPPED OUT. “Believe it or not, the geology at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is extraordinarily common. There, layers of sedimentary rock lie flat atop angled layers of significantly more ancient metamorphic rock. The gap there is enormous—if Earth’s rocks constitute a book of the planet’s history, there are about a billion pages missing. The story only picks up again around 540 million years ago in the Cambrian period, with an evolutionary explosion of complex life just as remarkable as the sudden change in the rock.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn

GLOBAL GAP. “This gap can be found all around the world, and has picked up the name the Great Unconformity. Cambrian sedimentary rocks rarely rest on anything other than much older metamorphic or igneous rock, implying that whatever rock formed in the intervening time was scrubbed away by something. This erasure of a chunk of geologic history has long been an enticing mystery for geologists.” https://lnkd.in/dtYSB5v View in LinkedIn