In order to get a change of scenery I spent the summer of 2006 working north of Boulder and living in a Teepee. My transportation was mainly my bike and Longmont was a better destination than crowded Boulder. It also sported a very nice library with a big non-fiction audio book collection, which was very exciting considering I’d long run out of decent nonfictions at my home town fiction loving library. Browsing through their rows of “The Great Courses” series, I spied something new "Origins of Life."
Origins of Life
Professor Robert M. Hazen, Ph.D.
George Mason University
The Great Courses.com - course 1515
With a title like that, I couldn’t say no. It turned out to deliver one astounding surprise after another, along with a few revelations to boot. I needed to listened a second time before returning, despite its 12 hour length. Since then I've made a point of listening to pretty near every YouTube lecture featuring him and there are many.
I also liked that this new understanding also vindicates my own reflexive disgust at having read some serious scientists assume that for the first few billions of years nothing happened on Earth. It seemed a ridiculous notion to me and so it was. Just like junk DNA, or wasted brain matter, nonsense - it was simply that we hadn’t learned enough to know what it was doing yet. Seems that conceit and short sightedness has been a predominate feature in human thinking going way back.
The beauty of science is that truth and honesty and evidence is valued - authoritative facts win in the end. This is because scientists belong to a community of dedicated, competitive, informed, skeptical individuals who buy into the basic premise that: We Need Each Other To Keep Ourselves Honest.
Also they work under a set of rules, that puts honest observation at the top of the list, because constructively learning about our planet, along with her ways and means, is the goal. A place where geophysical facts rule over personal opinion and preferences.
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According to Neal deGrasse Tyson this is how science operates:
(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.
(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so.
(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it.
(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.
And perhaps the most important rule of all...
(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were human.
Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each other.
{Mistakes are learning opportunities !}
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AAAS / Science for All Americans Online
Chapter 1: THE NATURE OF SCIENCE
SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
THE SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRISE
Copyright © 1989, 1990 by American Association for the Advancement of Science
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More recently I’ve purchased and listened to another couple outstandingly informative Robert Hazen reads - You can’t go wrong with them if you’d like to discover a more complete understanding of the process of Evolution and our world’s creation unfolding one day at a time.
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
Robert M. Hazen has written many more books, take a look.
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Then there are the videos, everyone fascinating, some overlap, but each offers a little bit others don’t. This is my lazy guy’s path to serious learning:
Origin of Life - How Life Started on Earth
A nifty NOVA documentary
If you want to get down to the meat and potatoes these lectures are the way to go:
The Story of Earth: How Life and Rocks Co-Evolved
Dr. Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory
The story of Earth is a 4.5-billion-year saga of dramatic transformations, driven by physical, chemical, and—based on a fascinating growing body of evidence—biological processes. The co-evolution of life and rocks, the new paradigm that frames this lecture, unfolds in an irreversible sequence of evolutionary stages. Each stage re-sculpted our planet's surface, each introduced new planetary processes and phenomena, and each inexorably paved the way for the next. This grand and intertwined tale of Earth's living and non-living spheres is only now coming into focus.
Sequential changes of terrestrial planets and moons are best preserved in their rich mineralogical record. "Mineral evolution," the study of our planet's diversifying near-surface environment, began with a dozen different mineral species that formed in the cooling envelopes of exploding stars. Dust and gas from those stars clumped together to form our stellar nebula, the nebula formed the Sun and countless planetesimals, and alteration of planetesimals by water and heat resulted in the approximately 250 minerals found today in meteorites that fall to Earth.
Following Earth's growth and separation into the core, mantle, and crust, mineral evolution progressed by a sequence of chemical and physical processes, which led to perhaps 1500 mineral species. According to some origin-of-life scenarios, a planet must evolve through at least some of these stages of chemical processing as a prerequisite for life. Once life emerged, mineralogy and biology co-evolved, as changes in the chemistry of oceans and atmosphere dramatically increased Earth's mineral diversity to the almost 5000 species known today.
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Robert Hazen - Mineral Evolution and Ecology and the Co-evolution of Life and Rocks (March 11, 2015)
Check out:
More details: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/even...
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The Emergence of Life on Earth
(Visit: http://seminars.uctv.tv/) Robert Hazen examines the question of the origin of life. [Show ID: 23674]
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ROBERT HAZEN - CHANCE, NECESSITY, AND THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
Hazen looks at the big questions:
Is life a cosmic imperative?
How can we study life’s origins in the lab?
Does life exist on other worlds?
. . . and he shares some breaking science news
Streamed live on Nov 12, 2015
NOTE: the lecture begins at the 13:20 minutes mark. (well a long interesting introduction - Hazen’s lecture begins at 25:20)
Robert Hazen, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science
Earth's 4.5 billion year history is a complex tale of deterministic physical and chemical processes, as well as "frozen accidents". Most models of life's origins also invoke chance and necessity.
Recent research adds two important insights to this discussion.
First, chance versus necessity is an inherently false dichotomy--a range of probabilities exists for many natural events.
Second, given the astonishing combinatorial chemical richness of early Earth, events that are extremely rare may, nevertheless, be deterministic on time scales of a billion years.
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Dr Robert Hazen - Frontiers of Science
The Story of Earth: How Life and Rocks Co-evolved
Dr. Robert Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory & Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University
The story of Earth is a 4.5-billion-year saga of dramatic transformations, driven by physical, chemical, and—based on a fascinating growing body of evidence—biological processes. The co-evolution of life and rocks, the new paradigm that frames this lecture, unfolds in an irreversible sequence of evolutionary stages. Each stage re-sculpted our planet’s surface, each introduced new planetary processes and phenomena, and each inexorably paved the way for the next. This grand and intertwined tale of Earth’s living and non-living spheres is only now coming into focus. (recorded December 7, 2017)
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Robert Hazen: Unanswered questions in deep carbon research
Dr Robert Hazen's lecture at the annual Molecular Frontiers Symposium at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, May 2013. The topic of the 2013 symposium was "Exploring the boundaries: the science of the extremes". Check our YouTube channel for more exciting science videos!
For more information, visit www.molecularfrontiers.org
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The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a global community of more than 1000 scientists on a ten-year quest to understand the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon in Earth.
Who we are
Ninety percent of Earth’s carbon resides inside the planet, yet we are only just beginning to understand the many ways deep carbon impacts the oceans, atmosphere, and life at the surface. That’s why in 2009 a team of scientists launched an international collaboration, with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to investigate how the deep carbon cycle drives our world.
DCO brings together a multidisciplinary group of scientists, including geologists, chemists, physicists, and biologists.
Our community, the DCO Science Network, is made up of more than 1200 scientists from 55 countries, involving scientists at all stages of their careers. Many opportunities exist for early career scientists to be active participants in the Network.
How we bring research to life
The DCO Data Science Team works independently and in collaboration with scientists across the four communities to develop new analyses and exploit large, connected datasets.
Our Modeling and Visualization Initiative provides researchers with tools and techniques to better share their scientific findings among colleagues and with the public.
The DCO Engagement Team shares DCO science with scientists, educators, and the public via this website, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr to help ensure DCO’s scientific findings are integrated into current scientific thinking.
DCO offers a wide array of resources for educators to help integrate DCO’s latest findings into university-level curricula.
Since Wikipedia is the first stop for information on the web, DCO is committed to integrating the latest deep carbon science research on Wikipedia. Learn how you can help.
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