Friday Meanderings: The Panzoic Effect in Psyche & Cosmic Evolution
It has been an absolutely stellar (and tiring) week.
Early this week, an article I wrote on The Panzoic Effect was published in Psyche Magazine!
We also had an episode of Ask an Astrobiologist that featured Dr. Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum, London. It was awesome to chat with Sara about her work in meteoritics and planetary science, as well as the work that she and others are doing on OSIRIS-REx samples from asteroid Bennu and the upcoming MMX mission (which will bring back rocks from Mars’ moon Phobos).
On top of that, I spoke with some young students at the Robinson School in Puerto Rico about space exploration and astrobiology, and I’m just about to join a podcast interview with Ayush Prakash.
The hits keep on hitting. I’m tired, but it’s a good kind of tired.
The Panzoic Effect in Psyche
Super stoked to have the concept of The Panzoic Effect as first presented at TEDxBoulder last year published this week in Psyche Magazine.
Along with my work here on The Cosmobiologist, I’ve been doing a deep dive on topics like transformative experiences (meditation, psychedelics, journeys to remote places, etc.) and ways that people are impacted by thinking about our place in the cosmos. Some of my Visiting Scholars at BMSIS, like Jessica Xhumari and Rabeea Rasheed, are similarly working on writings around such topics in self-transformative experiences and space psychology. There will be far more to come here in this newsletter (and hopefully in the book-length treatment that I have int he works).
But if you want to know more and explore the concept of The Panzoic Effect, then check out the article in Psyche now:
The ‘panzoic effect’: the benefits of thinking about alien life
Some Thoughts on Cosmic Evolution
We are quite literally the result of a lineage of creation and destruction—of birth and death, of formation and decay, of cosmological evolution and transformation—that has spanned billions of years of known existence.
As far as we know, our universe was born into existence some 13.8 billion years ago. We don’t really know (and some may argue we can’t know) if anything came before the known universe. It could be that the cosmos as we know it was truly born from nothing, though there are some leading hypotheses of what, if anything, may have come before. But we do know that everything we experience comes from processes of creation and transformation over these past eons in the universe. To understand that, we can explore one of my favorite words in all of science: nucleosynthesis.
Nucleosynthesis is a term that signifies the many processes that form new elements. During the first three minutes of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis caused the formation of almost all of the atomic matter in the universe. Hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium formed. Almost all of that is still around now (you have atoms of hydrogen in your body that are as old as time).
But there are other nucleosynthetic processes that happen inside of stars, during stellar explosions and neutron star mergers, when cosmic rays slam into other matter, when cosmic rays bombard a planet’s atmosphere, and even during the detonation of atomic weapons.
We have within us an assemblage of atoms and molecules that have formed through myriad events and processes in the cosmos long before our lives began—some even predating our Sun.
The physical forces of nature have drawn matter through space and time to collapse into stars, to swirl together into galaxies, to form planets and moons and other planetary bodies, to dance around through orbits and gravitational attractions. Stars are born, they fuse through the material in their cores, and then their primary “lives” end when they can fuse almost no more—some stars will then swell and shrink and then blow off their outer layers, while some other stars are so large that they experience core collapse and go through a supernova explosion. Some stars become white dwarfs while others might become neutron stars or black holes.
Within stellar systems planets and moons and other things may form. The large disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star begins seeing the aggregation of larger bits and chunks, some of which go on to aggregate further. If they get big enough, then gravity and chemical interactions can cause their insides to warm up and their shapes become more spherical. Some of these worlds form planets, some others may destroy previously formed planets. To our best knowledge, our Moon formed early in our solar system after a planet-that-once-was which was about the size of Mars crashed into the Earth—much of the heavier material sank into the Earth, making our world more dense, while much of the lighter stuff ended up forming our Moon.
Each world is its own microcosm. Every planetary body is a potential experiment in chemistry and physics and geology. In one little microcosm orbiting a rather average star in one corner of the Milky Way galaxy—life happened.
To our best knowledge, life originated on (or came to) Earth something like 4 billion years ago. The bits of evidence we have for life around that time are scant, due primarily to the way that geological evolution and plate tectonics has formed and recycled rocks on the surface of our world for eons.
New crustal material forms, it floats around on the surface, sometimes spitting out bits that become continents and aggregate together and sometimes going through various processes of erosion and weathering, deposition, diagenesis and lithification (processes of change in sediments and ultimately leading to new sedimentary rocks), and sometimes even metamorphosis. But a good deal of the rocks that have existed in the past have ultimately been subducted, where one tectonic plate overrides another and the lower material sinks into the mantle, where it melts and rejoins the interior of our world.
The geological history of Earth has been a dance of chemistry. And that dance itself has been influenced by the living things that have come and gone.
In its earliest ages, life on Earth seems to have primarily been microbial (we don’t know if there was anything else or if anything else would even be possible). Somehow life developed an informational system (RNA and DNA), it developed metabolism to alter the chemistry of the environment to drive reactions and make biomass, and it found itself encapsulated within cells.
Those miniscule creatures took their part in the cosmic act of evolution and transformation, through time coming to occupy nearly every niche and corner of the planet they could find. Eventually, some single cells of creatures began clumping together and working together. Some of those clumps became multicellular beings. Life at some point discovered sex—sex is quite literally a part of evolution that allows for greater mixing among creatures. Earth went from a world covered in microbial life to one where a great biodiversity of larger creatures took hold. Plants and animals and fungi have now come to occupy many of the available ecosystems on Earth along with our microbial companions. Earth today is estimated to have some 550 Gigatons of carbon locked up in biomass, with roughly 80% of it within plants.
This is all a rather roundabout way to explore how we now are the result of eons of creation, transformation, and evolution. We are among the results of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution.
As I’ve explored in a previous writing, we are also more than just these processes that have led to the creation of our physical material and the evolution that has led to our existence. Along with the physical connections of our atoms and molecules with the rest of the cosmos, evolution has connected us through eons in a lineage of cosmological development. And evolution has driven us through this lineage to develop sensory perception, intelligence for problem solving and technological development, and the capability to ask ourselves grand questions about the nature of our existence. Through science and philosophy we’ve come to better know our own place in the cosmos. As Carl Sagan once said, “We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
While we don’t exactly know what life is, what intelligence is, or what consciousness is, we do know that we are living intelligent beings with an awareness of ourselves and our realm. We are cosmic evolution in action.
It really is such a pleasure to share in my journeys with all of you. If any of my readers ever want to meet up for a chat about life, the universe, and everything, I’m game. Just reach out and let me know!