Celebrating Earth Day with NASA Senior Climate Advisor Katherine Calvin and Sylvia Earle - Time Magazine’s first Hero for the Planet
Earth — the planet nearest and dearest to our hearts (not to mention our feet) is our planetary cradle, and for now, our only home. As our species reaches out to other planets and beyond, our world will continue to be our birthplace in the Cosmos.
Throughout the last 4.5 billion years or so, the Earth has seen numerous traumatic events. The first of these took place when our planet was just a baby — less than 100 million years old (that’s 5,218,000,000 weeks for all you new parents out there). As the solid surface of the Earth was still taking shape, our nascent world was struck by a Mars-sized body, named Theia, forming the Moon.
Life took root early on our nascent world, but for the vast majority of the history of our planet, this life remained simple one-celled organisms. And were we to somehow visit this time, we would find Earth an alien, hostile world, wrapped in what we would quickly find to be a poisonous atmosphere.
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Make sure to join us next week, as we look at Exoplanets: Worlds Beyond Our Solar System, and welcome astronomer Thayne Curie to the show. He recently discovered a bizarre massive world!
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Clear skies!
James
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Here’s the full script continued below!
When cyanobacteria evolved 2.4 billion years ago, these organisms developed photosynthesis, drawing energy directly from the Sun, leading the way to the later development of plants.
The waste product of cyanobacteria — oxygen — began to fill the atmosphere more than two billion years before out time.
What might seem like an improvement for us was a disaster for life around globe. This Great Oxidation Event spelled the end of the road for organisms for whom oxygen was poisonous. Things then settled down for a long time.
Later, life decided it takes a village to raise a cell, and singular cells began living together. Mitochondria took their place as the energy centers of some cells. These new cells were controlled from a central nucleus, and the first eukaryotic cells took their place on the world’s stage, leading the way for complex life.
The first animals appeared 800 million years ago or so, including the first sponges, and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
At the time, there was still little free oxygen in the oceans of Earth. However, sponges were able to live in the low-oxygen environment by, well, not really doing much of anything at all. They just sit there all day, waiting for food to float by. These colonies formed the first reefs on Earth. Oxygen levels rose over time, and the first worms began to burrow along the seafloor.
The Cambrian Explosion was a genetic jackpot, as life proliferated for over 55 million years, starting 540 million years before our time. Animals developed shells for the first time, and we can only assume the first shell game developed soon after.
Adorable little trilobites lived in these ancient oceans, thriving in a diverse range of environments. By 485 million years ago, nearly all the most basic forms of life had been established.
Around 440 million years ago, climatic changes resulted in rising ocean temperatures, leading to the extinction of 85 percent of all species in the ocean.
On 3rd May, we will look at water worlds of the Cosmos. We will be joined by Time Magazine’s first Hero of the Planet, oceanographer Sylvia Earle. Here’s a look forward to that interview.
Fifteen million years later (give or take), a few brave (or perhaps foolhardy) animals left the safety of the ocean and began to live on land.
The first dinosaurs entered stage right 230 million years and ruled Earth for nearly 165 million years, 550 times longer than modern humans have walked Earth.
The best known extinction event took place 66 million years ago, when our planet was walloped by an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest, and dinosaurs exited stage left.
Several species of humanoid creatures evolved a few million years ago, but by 40,000 years ago only modern humans remained. This was also the era when human beings developed the first musical instruments and began wearing shoes.
Language was first fully developed around this time, and bookkeeping followed soon thereafter. Dogs and humans joined together 23,000 years ago, and the first loaf of bread was baked 14,000 years before our time.
Around 1760, the Industrial Revolution kicked off in Europe and North America. Products which were once made by hand were churned out in vast numbers by the new automated machines, largely powered by coal.
Waste from factories began to pollute the air, leading to higher rates of respiratory illness and higher death rates in areas where coal was burned en masse. And, even as early as the 1830s, this waste began to raise average temperatures worldwide. Humans began to change the global climate.
Today, as we seek to better understand our world, and learn how to mitigate the effects of climate change, we are dependent on space exploration to help monitor and heal our fragile planet.
For our Earth Day special, we welcome Dr. Katherine Calvin to the show. She is Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor for NASA.
In order to preserve the Earth, we must journey into space. Environmental science depends on observations taken from high above our world.
As we move out into the Cosmos, our planetary cradle remains our first, and most welcoming home. Space is a hard place, and Earth remains our planetary cradle. But the same world which gave birth to our species also taught us to explore, discover, and learn. And to do that, we must journey out to other worlds.
Join us next week, as we look at exoplanets — worlds beyond our Solar System. We will be joined by astrophysicist Thayne Currie, who recently found a bizarre exoplanet nine times more massive than Jupiter. Join us starting on 26 April.
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Tally-ho!
James
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