Robert Hazen - Origins, mineral evolution - What a scientist sounds like.

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

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/professors/robert-m-hazen/

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 !}

Pruitt - life and mineral co-evolution made our atmosphere, Dr. Hazen

I mentioned this talk at the end of my previous post and have decided to share the entire talk followed by notes, since (besides being fascinating) it provides more depth to our understanding of Earth's evolution - a necessary ingredient for appreciating today's geophysical processes, and their transformation over time.  Here we look at the intimate relationship between life and mineral and geological evolution.  It provides an essential prerequisite for a clear understanding of our atmosphere and the Global Heat and Moisture Distribution Engine that sustains our lives.  

Dr. Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory

Published on Jul 29, 2014 - CarnegieInstitution - 57:29 minutes 

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08EaPC0zetw

Pruitt about our atmosphere. In the beginning.

At the root of Republican (and Pruitt’s) inability to understand our global climate engine and what we are doing to it, is their shallow perception of our planet.  To them our “environment” and “biosphere” are abstract concepts with the depth of a post card to their minds.

It requires a serious understanding of and appreciation for these past four and half billion years of dynamic evolution unfolding one day after another before you can hope to understand what’s happening to our atmosphere and what it promises for our future.

Here we consider very deep-time, the first four billion years of Earth’s evolution.  Earth, birth of the global ocean, fundamental geo-physical mechanisms falling into place, such as the geomagnetic field, plate tectonics, continent formations, dim sun, near moon, massive global tides, the dance between mineral evolution and primitive life, the dance between life and our evolving atmosphere.  

These are prerequisites for understanding our global heat and moisture distribution engine. 

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I start with a short video that helps put the notion of deep time into perspective.  Then a lucid introductory lecture from an excellent speaker, Professor Julie Ferguson, discussing our atmosphere’s evolving composition.

This is followed by Co-evolution of Minerals and Life | Dr Robert Hazen.  Along with some further thoughts and links to many more relevant resources written by experts and other authoritative science communicators.

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4.6 Billion Years in the making. Our wonderful world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra9lwKn75s

yumorganics

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UCIrvine OpenCourseWare

Published on Apr 3, 2014 - University of California at Irvine

ESS 5. Lec 01. The Atmosphere: Composition and Evolution of the Atmosphere

Professor Julie Ferguson, Ph.D.  -  Earth System Science