We are beginning the second peak of this COVID-19 pandemic and I just ended to read Marcia Bjornerud's book on how thinking as a geologist can help to save the world. It might be that I was looking for answers to such big present uncertainties. Amazingly, I found this awesome explanation on life evolution and mass extinctions to make me feel humble on whatever effort to try to change the world and rather to try to understand it better and be in consonance with what sorrounds me.
"The great mass extinctions challenge any conceit that we (humans) are triumphant culmination of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals, the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of al biomass on Earth. One might say that Earth's biosphere is and always has been, "microcracy", ruled by the tiny. When larger, arriviste life-forms falter, infinitely adaptable microbes, whose evolutionary timescales are measured in months rather than millennia, are always eager to move in and reassert their long-held dominion over the planet"
At certain period of geological time "Organisms that have invested everything in the old world order will suffer or even be extinguished while microbes quietly clean up the mess and decree a new set of rules for the survivors. Tinkering with atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business; ungovernable forces can come out of thin air".
After this.. I'm just thinking on using my scientific knowledge to protect me and those around me and be 100% Darwinist. Nature will make the rest.
