Material flows like air flows and water flows are the movement of sediment across the rock face.
.
Gravity
The apple fell from the tree and kept on rollin right into the sea.
There are huge conveyor belt type currents of water flowing in the oceans but there are also large currents of sediment flowing into the oceans from the land. The cycle of rock rising out of the earth's mantle, eroding into powder and mixing with all kinds of non mineral materials as it washes back down onto the ocean floors where it is eventually sucked backed down into the mantle where tectonic plates are colliding, known as subduction. As the sediment slides back down into the ocean it mixes everything on the surface of the earth, natural and man made, producing a growth medium whose composition has been changing over the time. The current growth medium still produces a nice mixture of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen compounds which support the current version of multicelluar life. If the composition of the single cell material changes than it is likely their output products can also change. The composition of the single cell life can change as the overall growth medium changes. Very little is known about the vast bacteria colonies that span the ocean floors. Even less is known about the genetic communication between the deep underwater bacteria and their cousins on the shore.
.
The land to water sediment conveyor belt has been running for 4 billion years. As soon as the first liquids appeared on the earths surface (not water as we know it) there was run off into the oceans which were a vast chemical stew. For example, there were rivers of cyanide dissolving gold out of the erosion beds they ran in, carrying the yellow metal down to the oceans. The crust was still soft and the first oceans were unlike anything we have ever known. As time went on the water vapors trapped in the earth pushed their way to the surface eventually condensing and starting the new water oceans on their way to their current status. There was also comet water coming in contributing to the world's oceans. The liquids running off the land fed the oceans whatever eroded off the rock. Eventually life appeared in the oceans but it did not prefer oxygen, in fact oxygen was toxic to the original inhabitants. At some point, around 2 billion years ago oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere. The run off of minerals and mineral products from the land gradually started to contain organic material as simple life forms broke down the eroded rock and mineral bits forming clay. People have suggested that the arrival of clay in the run off going into the oceans from the great land based conveyor belt helped to bind up carbon that had been soaking up some of the free oxygen which prevented the oxygen from being released into the atmosphere. The oxygen producing cyanobacteria in the oceans also started to receive nutrients from organic material in the run off from the land. The organic material was dirt created by the life and death of the simple life forms that had started to live on the surface. The oxygen levels climbed to around 20 percent and stopped. No one knows why it leveled off at that value, nor does anyone know what keeps the oxygen level at 20 percent. It could well be that that is the natural level for oxygen production by the existing microbes for the current environment on earth.
.
Eventually the photosynthesis component of the cyanobacteria became implanted in leaves in land plants and water plants, and in other parts of various kinds of plants. Some people have suggested that during this current geological age the plant leaves could be producing up to sixty percent of the oxygen. This is probably unlikely because of the planet wide vast deforestation that has been going on for the past two thousand years has not changed the oxygen levels. The plants arrived long after the microbial oxygen producers and have a much shorter blood line so to speak. Two billion years versus a couple of hundred million would seem to indicate that the plants are the secondary producers of oxygen, perhaps adding to the the overall level but not controlling the overall level. Because the land plants could all disappear from natural causes, such as a large meteor collision, and the microbe population would not disappear as confirmed by their 4 billion year track record, this would be another reason to assign the majority label to the microbial population. The original oxygen level control was established by the microbes before the land was flourishing with plants, this has not changed although the mechanism for this can't be detected.
.
The sediment sits on the land and is slowly pulled into the oceans by gravity. The majority of land is above sea level and that automatically gives the sediemnt on the land the energy it needs to get to the ocean. The destination is the ocean because the oceans are the lowest points of land, the natural destination of everything rolling down hill. The water in the air and in the land helps move the sediment into the oceans. Floods and droughts accelerate the movement of sediment to the ocean floor, otherwise it is the slow pull of gravity moving the sediment along. At any time, sediment clouds will be found in any block of space in the life zone surrounding the planet containing life, water, gasses, and sediments. The position of the sediment clouds is usually dependent on the densities of the various components of the sediment clouds. Lots of gas and a general low density will find the sediment cloud in the sky. A higher sediment density will put the sediment cloud on the ground as a pile of dirt. A higher water density can mean the sediment cloud has reached the ocean and is finally settling out, as sediment slowly raining down on the ocean floor.
The planet core is made of molten metal and rock, out side of that is the mantle which is more or less solid rock. Covering that rock surface is the atmosphere, which is where you find life and water. The atmosphere extends above the surface to where outer space is encountered. The atmosphere is shaped like a hollow sphere with thick walls, just like a geode. The outer surface of the sphere is where outer space starts. At this point meteorites and comets start to break up. This is where cosmic dust, comet ice water and the solar wind enter the earths gravity and get sucked into the atmosphere. The inner wall of the hollow sphere extends into the outer rock surface of the earths crust. It goes as down as far as life and water are able to penetrate.
This ball of rock has a gravity field that keeps the sediment moving across the rock face to the lowest point it can go.
The gravity field also pulls in extraneous sediment and energy that is floating around in space.
Light waves are not sediment.
Water, organic mater, loose rock and minerals of any size are examples of sediment.
.
The Earth is located in an area in the solar system where the triple point of water is observed everyday of the week. While it is a really good thing, this is
not the only place this is happening. This planet is not sacred, there are no holy spots. Water is found everywhere in the universe, in some cases in rather large amounts. 12 billion light years away there is a cloud of water weighing in at 40 billion times the mass of Earth.
Where is the Life
Classical definitions have the zone where Earth's life is found divided into the atmosphere, hydrosphere, the top layer of the lithosphere and the biosphere. Some people even want to include a few other spheres based on personal preferences of what is important and what is not so important to themselves, not to the real world. This elaborate effort to cut the actual life system into three or more separate parts only serves to confuse the issue. People like to subdivide issues into tiny bite size bits that have no connection to the workings of the real world. Armed with tiny bits of reality people can win arguments that mean nothing or they can tie up a conversation in knots that will never illustrate anything. Everywhere life is found, in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and the biosphere, whatever names are used, that is what makes up the life zone, there is no other way to look at it. Trying finding the physical dimensions of the biosphere, you won't find it, and yet the physical dimensions of the biosphere have to include the atmosphere and the hydrosphere and a bit of space below the hydrosphere based on where the air and water and life cease to appear. So it should be very easy to state the physical size of the biosphere.
.
When you talk about the biosphere as a system that does not require the hydrosphere and the atmosphere to be part of the description then you are talking about non specific biosphere systems in other astronomical locations besides our own. If you are going to speak about other world biosphere systems that do not need the Earth's atmosphere and the hydrosphere as part of their descriptions than the first thing that needs to be done is to remove the statement from every article that says that the only known place that life is found is on the planet earth, which opens a much wider discussion. In other world biospheres the liquid does not need to be water, the air does not need to be the atmosphere we have here. One must either open up the discussion to include biospheres on other worlds as entirely possible without question or include the Earth's atmosphere and hydrosphere as inseparable parts of the Earth's biosphere, which might be easier to do. Basic facts about the Earth such as the shape of the earth, its size and its position in the solar system have been known and unknown at multiple times over the past couple of thousand years.
.
The planet doesn't need saving, only our way of life we have become accustomed to needs saving.
.
No one is saving the planet, that is pure nonsense, the song of parrots. The dominant life forms are the single celled varieties that have been around in one form or another for a couple of billion years. From this bed of life multicellular life makes appearances. The single cell life will be around for forever, the multi cell life comes and goes like the tides. Multicell life can create its own living space in order to survive the long term. Carving up the planet like it was a dead animal does not constitute creating a secure living space. The people who say lets save the planet are only interested in preserving the structure that supports their own life style. The planet and the single cell life has no need of multicell life. The planet is green because of single cell life not because of green leaves. The planet will always have life on it, whether this includes multi cellular life is another issue. So save the planet is actually save my life style and nothing more.
.
The single cell life forms have their own food chain and multicell life forms are not needed for that food chain to exist or to survive. The single cell food chain system was in existence for a couple of billion years before mutlicellular life formed.
The multicell life forms food chain is completely dependent on the existence of the single cell food chain systems.
Some single cell species have become dependent on multicellular life but their existence is not needed for the overall existence of the single cell systems.
.
The sediment cloud extends down about 10 to 20 miles below sea level, or the lowest point water and life is found. This boundary is below the bottom surface of the seas and oceans. It would be located in the rocky material below the ocean or sea floors. How far down is anybody's guess.
The upper boundary of the sediment cloud is around 75 miles above the land or ocean surafces, or the highest point where earth originated life is actually found. This is around where meteorites and comets start to break apart.
.
Bacteria, viruses, genetic material is found throughout this entire area, a hollow ball with thick walls stuck to the outside of the planet's rock surface. This hollow ball with thick walls is filled with gases, solids, and liquids both organic and inorganic materials which are held in place by gravity. Within these boundaries there is air, clouds, water, dirt, organic life, basic sediments and anything else that is free floating around not part of the solid rock. Free floating can be at any speed, even millions of years per inch of movement. The air is sediment in gas form. The sediment layers have more or less specific zones where they can be found. Life rearranges the flow of the sediments and the flow of sediments rearranges life. Extraction of oil and water from great depths and changing the ozone layers are examples of life rearranging the sediment.
.
Normal biological processes produce gases such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, as well as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen compounds, and others. These compounds are also produced by mechanical means by the "total landscape" both above ground and below ground. The substances produced by the biological means are connected to each other by feedback loops. They interact with the mechanical productions of the planet. Normal biological processes also produce ordinary dirt which is one of the most used resources on this planet by all of its inhabitants both single cell and multicellular. The oceans hold the heat and the cold energy while the air moves the heat and cold energy around.The immediate interaction between air and water is weather. The long term interaction between air and water is dirt. Even in the oceans most of the underwater life is using some sort of air mixture to live, reproduce, and eventually produces dirt.
.
.
Extreme bacteria are not extreme, they are not rare, and they are not unusual. Only in the minds of people who can't see the the world for what it is would this make any sense. But then again, people keep forgetting that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Bacteria define the limits of where life is found on Earth. The fact that bacteria can exist in places people can not exist does not make them extreme, no more so than saying people who wear long underwear in cold climates and people who go topless in the tropics are extreme examples of people.
Extremophile bacteria are neither extreme examples nor unusual species, they are simply living where people are not comfortable. Microbes are found throughout the entire atmospheric area which extends down about 10 to 20 miles below sea level, or the lowest point water or life is found to an upper boundary which is around 75 miles above sea level or the highest point where earth originated life is found. Wherever life is found that is where the real atmosphere is.
.
.
The fields of dirt covering the rock surface and the clouds sailing over head are both sediment deposits. They differ in density but otherwise both act as a sponge or pad or framework where life is found. Their are two basic forms of life, single cell and multicellular life. The majority of the single cell life does not need the multicellular life to exist, the multicellular life can not exist without single cell life. The single cell life can exist within the multicellular life and can exist outside of the multicellular life body. The majority of multicellular life can not exist within other multicellular life forms and the multicellular life can not exist within the single cell life forms. The multicellular life form food cycle is a small subset of the single cell life food chain. The single cell life form food chain exists without the multicellular life form food chain, the multicellular life form food chain can not exist without the single cell life form food chain. The single cell life forms are processing the entire sediment system every second of existence. The processed sediment from the single cell life forms is the basis of the existence of multicellular life forms.
.
The content of the sediment has been gradually changing as the multicellular life forms have increased their abilities to process larger and larger quantities of material. This processed sediment is gradually shifting the ph of some areas of the hydrospere. As far as the oceans are concerned, the ph changes have occurred mainly along the shore and where ocean currents have picked up and concentrated the modified sediments. By now everyone knows about acid rain so the concept of modifying the ph of water by man made activities is nothing new. The ph modified sections will cause various chemical interactions to occur as the pressure between ph modified areas and non yet modified ph areas interact. The ph of freshwater bodies are generally modified by gradually changing the ph of the entire body of fresh water. The salt water currents will prevent the ph modification from being uniform within the oceans.
.
The ph level of the ocean is a combination of averages and calculations and measurements and guesswork. In the last 100 years the atmosphere has seen an increase in carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide levels. The interaction at the ocean surface with the increased carbon dioxide levels could force more carbon dioxide to be absorbed by the ocean water. The problem with this scenario is that there are literally hundreds of substances interacting with the ocean water not just carbon, most of these substances are some how influenced by the increasing volume of human activities.
.
People are only looking at the substances that directly change the ph levels, such as increased dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean water. This approach shows the final result of many different types of changes happening at the same time while only looking at one of the many inputs (carbon dioxide). This type of situation allows people to say whatever they want. Besides carbon dioxide, there is carbon coming from all the soot and smoke and particles from the burning processes that happen when people utilize all of their resources that are landing on the ocean surface and being absorbed. Not to mention all the different carbon based chemicals that are going into the ocean, carbon dioxide is just one of what could easily be thousands of carbon compounds in sufficient quantity to have a physical impact on the ocean waters. Even simple sewage can have profound physical impacts on the immediate shoreline.
.
The clouds of dust are natural, the clouds of plastic particles are not naturally occurring but the dust is modified dirt and the plastic is modified oil so the dust storms landing in the oceans and the plastic particles raining in the oceans are similar in nature. With a lot of effort mankind could protect the soil so it did not create so much dust and the distribution of plastic particles could be better controlled but we don't.
.
All along the coasts of every country there is run off from human activity which covers everything from land run off containing farming, industrial, transportation, sewage, loose garbage and anything laying on the ground, manufacturing, whatever people dump down their drains is all going into the ocean. Great quantities of dust picked up by the winds from all the continents can travel hundreds to thousands of miles before landing on the ocean surface, and then eventually sinking down to the bottom of the oceans. While you have fresh water from the ice melting in the oceans, the amount of crap being dumped in the oceans offsets the idea that the fresh water will remain clean. All of this material changes the microbial activity in unknown ways. The question is what in the oceans regulates the ph and other important parameters. No one knows for certain but there is an almost unlimited number of mechanisms contributing to this regulation which means that once again people will convert everything to tiny bite size bits and then say anything that appears to make sense because there is nothing to refute it.
.
The concepts of global warming and acid oceans are the end result of millions of processes, events, including human activity, they are the final products in the equation. To change these events a tremendous amount of change is needed all across the board. Because global warming and acid oceans are symptoms and not causes they can not be used to treat the root problems.
.
Natural Recycling on a Global Scale is happening now, but not the way we would like it to happen.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is one of several gyre of marine litter. These gyre are huge grinding machines which slowly reduce the garbage into tiny bits that the ocean bacteria eat. It grinds it up by holding onto the garbage until it has been changed into a smaller format. Some of what the bacteria doesn't eat is distributed as food substitutes for anything that can eat it or take it into their bodies whether it is good for it or not. The rest of the material is going to unknown places, possibly just drifting away once it achieves a low enough mass. The material is going somewhere because it is not piling up in the ocean trash dumps after a prolonged period of time. The run off from this situation would be useful to examine both for its composition and path of departure.
.
Ocean currents can move items around the world in a few years across the surface or bring it down miles under the surface and take hundreds of years to come back around again.
.
People like to blame the shipping industry and the maritime industry for disposing of garbage in the open waters as the source of all that garbage but these are just one source of the garbage. As people populate the planet, everywhere you go water front property is being changed from untouched property to a piece of cleared for use property. All this activity brings development right up to the waters edge. By connecting the water front property to mainstream developed properties it acts as a conduit from inland to the open waters which reach the oceans. As the land is developed the quantity of run off material increases. As the shore land is cleared for human use it stops acting as a natural barrier to the run off from the inland and turns into a conduit which eventually leads into the oceans. The build up of inland locations works out to the shore land where it naturally stops. Once the area is developed more resources are brought into the area which increases the amount of material disposed off and increases the amount of material available for run off.
.
Because run off is everywhere it does not need huge volumes in small areas (such as pipes) to do damage. An infinite amount of unblocked shore line only needs a tiny amount of material per square inch from inland areas to pollute the oceans. Much of the material is redistributed mainly by settling, some of the material is picked up by currents which concentrate the run off as it transports material out of one area and brings it to another area. The settled material can always be disturbed at a later time and then moved out of the area. The plastic run off is simply the floating tip of a much bigger iceberg of substances that is washed into the oceans at an ever increasing rate. This is slowly changing the ph of some areas. It is possible that the mixture of materials washing into the waterways and oceans could actually be ph neutral at times.
.
Plastic items of all kinds made from all sorts of plastics from North America, Japan and Asia are collected by wind currents and surface currents and deposited in a stationary area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex. The exact size of this area is unknown, estimates start at twice the size of Texas going up to 8 percent of the of the size of the Pacific Ocean. The wind and ocean currents actually depresses the water level at the center of this system insuring that everything that is floating, partially submerged, or traveling under water because it hasn't quite sunk to the bottom ends up there. These areas are known as gyres.
.
There are five major ocean-wide gyres—the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and Indian Ocean gyres.
.
There could be up to 100 million tons of trash in gyres, mostly plastic. Only stuff that floats or drifts for thousands of miles can make the journey. The very nature of plastic makes it the ideal item. The most amazing thing is that the raw plastic chips that are used to make plastic products also make it to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Now how does the stuff that is used to make the products that end up as trash out there in the ocean also end up out there in the ocean. That is a pretty slick trick.
.
So you got all this plastic stuff just going round and round and it as it goes round and round it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces but it always keeps its identity, it never is anything but plastic, just smaller and smaller pieces of it. As it gets smaller and smaller it is ingested as food by all sorts of animals and plants from bacteria to shellfish to fish to mammals to sea birds. The density of the floating plastic is so great that it is greater than the zooplankton in some areas. The plastic particles are consumed as if they were zooplankton and put into the food chain. The nature of some plastics makes it similar to a sponge. Materials held in the sponge like plastic framework can be part of the plastic and they can also be substances the plastic has picked up during it's existence. These materials leach back out as the plastic ages.
.
The density of plastic particles falls off as the depth increases but there does not seem to be any measurements of the density of the plastic in the sediment. The ultra fine plastic particles have several routes to take as they settle to the bottom. They might never settle and just drift around in the area or be taken off by deep currents. The fine plastic particles might settle and form sediment that is used by the life living in the sediment and the plastic is put back into the food chain.
.
Another feature of plastic is that it absorbs other chemicals like a sponge. It sucks up oils, poisons, DDT, PCBs and other pollutants, such as oil from our cars. The plastic is constantly soaking up chemicals as it travels to the various gyres located around the world. There are many of these locations naturally collecting plastic we don't even know where they all are.Anywhere there are large circular wind and water currents you will find the plastic collecting and being ground down into finer and finer particles. There are millions of cases of sea animals eating plastic pieces that can be found stuck in their stomachs long after they ate the plastic. It looks like the food they eat so they just eat it up. When the animals die you can cut open their stomachs and see all the plastic parts they have ingested. You can't see the really fine plastic particles but they are in the great and small sea creature bodies that are part of the food we eat.
.
There are studies under way to see if the plastic that is being ingested by the sea creatures is making its way into the food that people eat and making them sick. The way it works in the academic world is until you can prove something makes you sick, it doesn't make you sick.
.
Some of the chemicals floating around look like hormones. The plastic absorbs this stuff as well. There are studies under way to if chemicals that look like hormones that are making their way into the food chain effect people the same way the real hormones do. Degraded hormones could also cause a negative or positive effect on those that consume it.
.
Meanwhile the amount of plastic being used in the world keeps increasing. A lot of the plastic items are disposable items but the material that they are made out of can last up to 400 years without losing its plastic identity. The amount of plastic making its way into the oceans just keeps increasing day after day. In an ironic example of unlimited wind power these massive plastic grinding machines churn away day and night slowly grinding the discarded plastic pieces into finer and finer particles.
.
There are no real plans to mine or otherwise gather up this plastic from the ocean surface.
What is Global Change
The biggest impact of Global Change for the current historical period is the shortening of time between events and the large scale genetic changes that are happening.
People think they are modifying genetic structures on their own terms but in reality, people have been unintentionally modifying the underlying genetic structure for hundreds of years now. The influx of refined chemical substances into the environment has changed the genetic structure of the single celled community and also caused changes in multicellular life. People are preparing genetically modified life to respond to life forms people have caused to artificially change in the first place.
.
There are millions of Global Changes taking place everyday, to think that Global Warming is The Cause to champion only ties one to a a dead end in the long run.
.
Global Dimming was denied to exist by both the people who support the concept of global warming and by the people who oppose the concept of global warming. Global dimming is very simple and very real. The fact that both sides of the global warming debate denied global dimming was real when in fact global dimming supported both sides means that each side is unbalanced in their point of view. It did not help the expensive computerized modeling programs respectability when the main components of global dimming data was inexpensive solar cells and simple pan evaporation data. The modeling programs have all the answers built in to them, the programs can not come up with original answers, the programs can only put forth what they already know, preprogrammed answers.
.
People living in comfortable climates tend to forget that the uncomfortable climate they predict is coming is already being experienced by many people on this planet as their normal existence.
.
The three phases of the industrial equation, energy generation, manufacturing and production, and the use and disposal of, can be applied to any society no matter what their technological level is. The arguments about Global warming and greenhouse gasses apply only to the energy generation part of the equation. The manufacturing and production, and the use and disposal of, parts of the industrial equation cause more pollution, fallout, change, cause and effect problems than the energy generation side of the equation and yet no mention is made about changing what is being done with the energy being generated.
.
A production center creating products that gum up the landscape will still continue to gum up the landscape whether it has a green energy source or not.
.
None of this is a conspiracy, a plot, a scheme, a cover up to do anything in particular. People have always been operating at cross purposes. Because racism is never abolished all the knowledge of the past has been thrown away by each new civilization, thinking that the previous civilization being of a different race or ethnicity or even the same bunch of people with a new set of beliefs were not worthy of knowing anything worth remembering. History does not repeat itself because people would have to learn something and remember it over a long period of time (historical knowledge) and they don't remember anything long term. Life is a series of random chance encounters enhanced by deliberately forgotten hard earned moments of truth.
.
Global Change includes everything that is changing. To take a stand on one particular aspect of the on going global change process without realizing that everything is interconnected makes one engage in arguements that can not be won by any side. For some people, letting the arguments get bogged down is their only goal.
.
It seems hard to believe that people can believe that people can change the global climate by their actions but these same actions can not change the genetic structure of the global life force.
.
It would appear that people believe that the global life force is more immune to the chemical imbalances created by people than the global atmosphere is. Forty years ago there were more people concerned about chemical pollution than climate change. The original concerns of chemical pollution included undesirable genetic changes of the animal populations. As more people became concerned about climate change, the thought of chemical pollution became less important even though climate change was caused by chemical pollution. The bulk and mass of the microbial population is a major part of the climate. On this planet, the climate is alive and will always be alive. The question is will the waste products of the single cell populations, a major part of the living part of the climate, continue to be beneficial to human health. Every week half of the worlds bacteria population is shredded by bacteriophages (viruses that "eat" bacteria), letting all that dead bacterial body mass rain down on the planet for all life forms to use.
.
Over the years the wording of the concerned has been switched from dirty chemical pollution to clean greenhouse gasses that are simply being released in over abundance. Look up global change and you will find many things being listed as changing but there will be almost no mention of the effects on the microbial populations. There will be changes listed that effect people, that effect the weather, even economic systems, wild animals, the oceans, item after item that lies within our grasp of what we personally deal with on a visual basis. You can find detailed information about a handful of microbes being effected by global change but these are almost all pertaining to diseases that humans can get or are getting. There is no talk about the basic microbial building blocks that make up the bulk of the living climate being changed in any way what so ever. This is because people absolutely believe that there are no changes happening at the genetic levels that will effect them. All of the global changes are about physical changes or diseases, genetic diversity or extinctions, there is nothing about changes happening to the day to day activities of single celled life caused by internal genetic changes. The sum output of the single cell bio mass is currently friendly to multi cellular life in the vast majority of cases. There is no reason why that situation can not change except for the fact that people simply believe it will not or can not change. The genetic make up of the single cell populations are not set in stone. Instead of producing oxygen for our consumption, all the single cell populations could mimic our actions and produce greenhouse gasses instead.
.
While global warming is an important topic, it is not the only thing changing and it may not be the most important, only the most visible. And global warming is still a bit in the future as far as impact goes.
.
Global change to our way of thinking has been running with a full head of steam for about 100 years now. The changes that have been going on in the viral and single cell types for the past 100 years is nothing short of amazing. Single cell organisms have been exchanging genetic information to make each other more resistant to the outside world for a couple of billion years.
.
Two big things happened in the last 100 years. First the different organisms used to be separated by distance and time, but thanks to the speed of business, organisms from Africa are rubbing membranes with organisms in North America every day of the week. So much for the protection afforded by distance separation.
.
The second thing that happened was that the organisms were subjected to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of chemicals that they would never have been in contact with naturally for tens, maybe hundreds of millions of years. These single cell organisms have been part of a mass of life that has been successfully existing for the past couple of billion years on this planet.
.
This mass of life gave birth to multi cellular life and it could conceivably bring it to an end as well and start up a new batch of multi cellular life. No one knows if this mass of life has a maximum mass, or if the total mass changes over time, having peak mass values and minimum mass values like low tides and high tides. The state of change of this biological mass could conceivably be way past the point of change comparable to the affects of global warming that we are waiting for, such as total ice meltdown.
.
Global warming is only one part of a continuing change that has been building up steam for the past 100 or 200 years. Global warming is the easiest thing for people to dwell on, to either deny, acknowledge or think they can change it or think it can't be changed. I am not saying it can't be changed but it is a symptom, not a cause. You can spend all your energy beating back symptoms and still die because the underlying cause was never treated.
.
Global warming is impersonal, indifferent, locked to the impartial physical world, a place where things are supposedly easy to fix or ignore. Global warming is the fall guy, the usual suspect. It is easy to think you see it somewhere else but not where you are. Even when it does seem like it is where you are, in a short while, the weather changes and suddenly the situation looks like global cooling or global raining or nothing global at all, just the weather happening. The weather can't be changed and can't be predicted with any certainty past next month. The weather is a comfortable enemy you think you can understand or accept it as it is.
.
It is easy to see that it is generally warmer today than it was yesterday by looking at all the melting that is going on in artic areas and the areas bordering the artic areas. This melting is producing a lot of liquid water and methane that is being released by the land deposits and under water deposits. All the burning of everything everywhere that is being burnt by everyone for whatever reasons is producing a lot of different oxides and compounds of carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, fluorine, chlorine, and others and most of this goes into the atmosphere where it gets mixed in with the water vapor, dust, dirt, lakes, and the oceans. That much is known because anyone can see it. These are more or less natural processes that can be duplicated by natural methods if one were to wait a very long time. However having all of these substances peak at more or less the same time is not a natural event but more like a catastrophic event.
.
The earth might be able to incorporate all these products into the climate process and smooth out the worst bumps and create a whole new set of standard climate conditions that we can live with. These are only physical changes. It turns out that if the people of the dark ages had started growing root vegetables right when everything started to go dark, things would not have gone so wrong for so long. Instead people continued to try to grow above ground grains and vegetables which were doomed due to the climate conditions. People don't like change and when people don't like change that means they want things to stay the same. Thinking that things will stay the same can prolong the adaptation to the new environment. All of this is only about physical changes. Change you can learn to live with.
.
Global warming is part of global change. Global change covers everything, as the name implies. Things are changing everywhere, so it is true, but the rate of and intensity of change is what is different from the normal ways of global change. All of these changes are macro changes you can easily see and by seeing them, you can supposedly side step them. So what if the physical world changes, people are at the top of the heap, they can always figure out some work around that gets them to the next finish line where one can breathe easy again.
.
The really big change that has everyone looking the other way is genetic change, not global change. Genetic change is something that can't easily be seen, can't easily be understood, can't be easily controlled.
.
Things seem to be looking better in the US, the old diseases of all kinds seem to be down, living is better, life is longer. Or so it seems. The micro organisms have a whole new menu of items to eat, many of the substances would never be seen for millions of years and the combination of substances being put into the ground for the micro organisms to eat would never show up naturally for billions of years. Don’t look to industry to police it self. While people are continually being told to cut back on antibiotic use the agricultural industry is using far larger quantities of antibiotics and other drugs which end up in the dirt where the micro organisms eat it all up. A disturbing trend is apparently developing where what used to be a simple run in with common bacteria, such as a simple case of food poisoning, that use to run its course and leave a person relatively unchanged can now lead to permanent changes mimicking old age such as kidney disease. Bacteria that could cause instant old age to counteract all the improvements in health care that have been leading to longer lives is not a good thing.
.
The dust from the farm gets on the package that is shipped and the vehicles that cruise by and everything is distributed far and wide. The spores and tough skinned micro organisms cross oceans without missing a beat. A few strange things are happening around the edges, just here and there, nothing in uncontrollable surges, not in the US anywhere. But go outside the golden borders and bedlam is exploding in all ways possible. There is a tremendous amount of stress on all the genetic lines right now. Some are responding quite well (not people), others are standing still, some gain or lose a bit, while still others are losing badly. When you lose badly you disappear. Forget about global warming and global change, genetic change is far more of a problem. Sure, you can change your carbon foot print, but you got hundreds of other foot prints that need changing as well.
.
The same way that the climate could be changing could be said about the genetic structure of cellular world. People can build walls and roofs to block out the rain and the cold or heat, but the walls that are needed to keep out unwanted cellular material are not so easy to build. A change in the genetic structure of the cellular world could turn out to be a change you can't live with.
.
As the speed of communications increases the apparent size of the world decreases.
.
The apparent size of the world decreases. This means that if you can see it, you can feel it. This means that the insulation factor of video is zero, unlike the black and white news films shown in the 1930's movie theaters. In that day and age it could take many years for anything you saw on the big screen to make it to your neighborhood. The black and white film days had great insulation because that was the speed of the times. In todays world, video is instantaneous, this means what it is showing you will be in your neighborhood sooner rather than later. If you can see it, you can feel it. The original messengers, viruses and bacteria, are on the fast track, because this is a fast track world. There is zero time spent on examining consequences. Just get everything out there as soon as you can. Delays cost money. The medium is the message was probably not including viruses and bacteria as part of the equation. But here they are, now communicating with you on a personal level. Is there any reason why these viruses and bacteria of supposedly far off lands should only exist in those places and not be everywhere all the time? There is no containment vessel to hold them, that was the job of slow moving economies, to lessen the impact. As the slow moving economies were dismantled the bacteria and viruses local to those areas sped away from their original source locations like bullets shot from a gun.
On the internet you can now hear the thoughts of endless numbers of people reporting the news as they see it and which allows one to come to conclusions that are based on numerous independent points of view. It started with the global village. Most people still fail to understand that the true meaning of global village means that if you can see it then you can feel it. The parameters that allow high speed communications destroy the comforting insulation that used to be provided by physical distance. To be perfectly blunt if you can see people really far away dying, then you too can also die from the same thing. In the global world, just because you can see something far away through a video camera doesn't mean you are immune from what you are looking at. What one allows to be done to others can be done to oneself. Watching without becoming involved is no longer practical. Fortunately in today's video world you can just check the don't like box and be on your way.
.
Instead of having global warming and global dimming and global whatever, lets just call it global weather. We can see all the exciting stuff, the sunny stuff, plus floods, droughts, storms, fields of growing crops, fields of dying crops, success and disaster global style. By watching real time things happening, you don't need to waste time imagining what could be happening, wondering if you should believe it or not.
.
Instead of trying to imagine what it would be like to be in a drought you could actually see real people going through a drought day after day on TV. Reality TV about real reality could increase drought awareness. Maybe people would not be so quick to dismiss the idea of a drought happening to them. Maybe a few more people would think of ways to counteract droughts that are happening now. I would like to see water brought in on a global basis, much the same way water was collected and distributed in ancient times using massive irrigation systems.
.
There is a biological machine on this planet that is much bigger than anything people can dream of.
It has been running for 4 billion plus years.
It is an example of perpetual motion.
.
This biological machine uses energy and matter to produce unimaginable quantities of products to be used and waste products which are also used.
The energy and matter is obtained from both natural unmodified sources and modified sources.
.
The microbes use to have to wait for things like winds and floods to move them into new areas to get new types of nutrients.
If the flood or winds never went to certain areas, chances are it would take millions of years to get there.
The transport system that people have built moves microbes and nutrients as well as cargo you can see.
Microbes use the same transport systems people use.
If the microbes can't get to the new location than the new nutrients can sometimes be brought to the microbes.
People have become the mules and pack horses for the single celled world.
.
A leaking nuclear industrial site can dispense simple radioactive substances into the environment which can then speed up natural mutation rates.
Without people building a plant that made the distribution of radiation possible it could take millions of years for those microbes to find a naturally occurring source of the same radioactive substances naturally released in their areas.
.
For microbes the waiting time for exposure to new nutrients and other substances has been effectively reduced from millions of years to just plain years.
.
The number of energy types is equal to all the different types of energy available on this planet.
For microbes the waiting time for exposure to new energy sources has been effectively reduced from millions of years to just plain years.
All of this would have happened eventually given enough time, but not in the close proximity to each other. With that close proximity, whatever one microbe gets to increase its overall chances of survival is automatically shared with other families of microbes. The microbes do not get stupider over time, they get smarter and more successful.
The number of substances available to this biological machine is equal to the number of substances available on this planet, minus the high energy particles we make that exist for only a few seconds or so.
.
We have been feeding this biological machine for a long time now.
About 2 billion years ago it started churning out oxygen.
This makes the earth green.
Do you really think that the oxygen output has to stay high just because we need it?
.
Everything we make eventually is thrown away into the dirt with the few exceptions of some fine art.
Once thrown into the ground or the water it becomes food all over again.
People like to think this is okay because supposedly the microbes would never change their list of allowable nutrients and would supposedly never change their waste product discharges plus whatever else they meant to produce for their own uses, such as toxins.
.
As we increase the number of chemical substances available to microbes the more resourceful they will become.
An interesting place to start would be to compare what substances were available 20,000 years ago compared to what is available now.
Whatever passed for a garbage dump 200,000 years ago was probably edible.
It is a safe bet that the garbage dumps 20,000 years ago were pretty much naturally biodegradable into normally occurring substances with the odd pieces of ceramics.
A garbage dump from a major populated area from today is probably not even suitable for landfill, so it is buried underground where the microbes get a fresh taste of industrial technology.
.
Even if people did stop doing everything they were doing, the momentum of the substances placed in the air, water, and ground would continue their physical movement for several years.
.
The global temperature is the result of millions of processes all running in real time. The timing is impossible to determine because some of the processes run one after another, others run at the same time, others run alternately, many run in overlapping fashion while others run years apart. This happens all over the globe second by second, year by year. And holding the stop watch in their hand is mankind, thinking that the whole world revolves around mankind. The amount and complexity of the waste products from the microbes on this planet make mankind look like a nickel and dime operation. The first two major pollutants created by life on this planet that greatly affected most life forms were oxygen and ordinary dirt.
.
A lot of the natural physical processes like clouds are going to happen no matter what people do. At the same time the chemical composition of those same unavoidable clouds is highly controlled by what people do. Controlling what goes into the clouds is under our control right now. Controlling the formation of clouds will not be under our control for a log time. So why do people try to change what can't be changed and ignore what they can change? It looks like people would rather change the glass the poison is delivered in rather than change the poison back to clean water.
.
Natural processes sometimes process the waste products we make and most of what we make ultimately becomes waste if you wait long enough. Only a few collectibles seem to stay out of the garbage can in the long run. There are two kinds of waste products, those that can be safely handled yielding safe by products and those that contain harmful substances that can not be changed, only passed along.
.
Dirty water for life
.
The supposedly fresh water animals are drinking and living in is polluted by hundreds, maybe thousands of chemical compounds, to think there is nothing wrong with this situation is a sure sign of incompetence unless a person is willing to use similarly polluted water. Ironically there are around a billion people forced to use this polluted water without choice.
.
Pharmaceutical products do not break down and are constantly recycled back into the water systems and ground systems. While a tiny amount of impurity usually won’t hurt a person, the real question is how many tiny amounts of different compounds do you need to cause a problem. One thousand tiny amounts is not the same as ten tiny amounts. One can only wonder what the true believers of homeopathic medicines think about the planet they are stuck on, subjected to thousands of minute quantities of unnatural substances that they can't avoid.
.
To remove these items form the water you need to spend money to purify the water. This makes it more expensive, to keep the price down, you have to settle for polluted water.
.
The real cost of purifying water is very expensive. Normal purification leaves a lot of junk chemicals in the water. Plus there is the enormous energy cost of the entire operation, which is never spelled out anywhere. There are also a lot of waste products that need to be cleanly disposed of.
.
The water world is a perfect example of living in your waste without problems. Fish poop is actually created on such a massive scale that it has a positive impact on the water world. It has to have a large scale positive effect after billions of years, the system has to work. During prehistoric times when life was bigger than normal, the water holes must have been one incredible collection of biodegradeable processes and yet life flourishes, because it had to. The life had to be able to within its waste without ill effects. No one was introducing refined chemicals into the system, everything was safe within reason. In plain words, the dirt was edible. In today's world the dirt is not always edible and can be quite fatal. The old dirt was recycled right back into the system to create more life. Today's dirt that has our garbage and waste in it has to be quarantined from the untainted dirt to be safe, quite a difference.
.
While all roads no longer lead to Rome, there is still a lot of fiddling going on.
.
Making the oceans work for our benefit - Yeah, right!
.
In reference to the idea of fertilizing the ocean with iron you hear some people saying it's time we made the oceans work for us. That is a pretty strange thing to say considering that people hardly do anything good for the oceans but people do pull a lot of stuff out of the oceans every day, as in taking anything not nailed down, as in massive harvesting, as in the oceans supply a lot of food for a lot of people. And after people eat, they dump a lot of the stuff in the oceans like they are extra large size garbage disposal units. Then you got your basic sewage treatment systems, they take in everything, sewage, waste water, sometimes street overflows, then they clean up the water using simple settling, bacterial processing, macro filtering, and sanitizing. The finished products are not drinkable or edible without a lot more work, so it goes into the ocean or into rivers that go into the ocean, or onto land where the run off goes into the ocean eventually. The waste is also buried under ground where it can spend 50 years or less traveling underground until it hits a large waterway and then makes it way to the oceans. That's a lot of work done by the oceans to clean up our waste products.
.
To make supposedly underperforming ocean areas put away more carbon dioxide we will use iron to fertilize the supposed underperforming areas of the oceans where there is enough nutrients but otherwise not enough iron to enable the micro organisms to photosynthesize oxygen. The situation of micro organisms and multi cellular organisms running out of one of the key elements they use for photosynthesizing so they are unable to continue photosynthesizing has been going on since time began. There are multiple organisms producing oxygen and using carbon dioxide because this follows the old time concept of not putting all your eggs in one basket. There are two ways to look at this, one is that when the organism is out of a key ingredient, it is no longer performing a useful function, and the other way is that it is performing a different function. So if we were to jam on the photosynthesis process to get the ocean to work for us, perhaps there would be some as of now unforeseeable consequences due to the fact that we are simply forcing the situation instead of understanding the situation. It would be similar to making a flying car by throwing a car out of an airplane in flight. The car would fly for a while and then the flying car would suffer a severe amount of damage.
.
Cyanobacteria seem to have a variety of configurations to fit any almost number of conditions of light, nutrients, and oxygen or lack of oxygen and other substances such as sulfur. There is probably a version of cyanobacteria to fit every water condition. The cyanobacteria have been around for 2 billion plus years in a non stop running show so they have most likely seen every type of water condition that could ever happen. Cyanobacteria can even be found on damp pieces of sand after a rain storm in the desert.
.
In oxygen-depleted water where sulfur is present, one version of cyanobacteria carry out photosynthesis using sulfur compounds and give off hydrogen sulfide.
.
In areas of the ocean with low nutrient levels and low iron levels, another version of cyanobacteria use oxygen and give off water.Since the nutrient levels are low, the organism needs to spend less energy living, so it takes in water and gives off water, skipping the whole energy intensive process of capturing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
.
In areas with good nutrient levels, the standard cyanobacteria everyone knows about carry out photosynthesis capturing carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen.
.
One of the "big scale" plans that won't cost much money is to have the ocean absorb more carbon dioxide is to release iron into the areas of the oceans that are lacking iron which is needed for the photosynthesis process to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. The areas that are low in iron are also low in other nutrients needed by that type of cyanobacteriaand so you find the version of cyanobacteria that use oxygen and give off water which is why you find less carbon dioxide being absorbed in those areas. You would need to add nutrients along with the iron. Just adding iron without nutrients is only going to produce marginal results. Adding nutrients is probably going to cause something else to grow as well. It has recently come to light that it is probably better to eat the whole foods to get the vitamin content rather than refining out the vitamins and just eating the refined product.
.
People are inclined to believe that these micro life forms will endure all that is dumped on them and still perform their functions the same as they always did, keep their physical appearance the same and keep their genetic structure intact so that one does not have to wonder about the stability of the system. Then again the ability of the system to remain stable under adverse conditions could create another set of problems, like producing green house gasses instead of oxygen.
.
It turns out that there is single cell life that look the same, live in the same places, live the same lives and yet do it with completely different requests of the substances they need to live with, causing different impacts on the carbon cycle. It was widely assumed that cyanobacteria used the photosynthetic process to remove carbon dioxide from the environment and release oxygen. It is now known that a type of cyanobacteria, synechococcus, growing in areas that are nutrient poor, skip the parts of photosynthesis that require intake of carbon dioxide. Instead it takes in oxygen to run the photosynthesis process.
.
Synechococcus lives in the nutrient poor parts of the oceans while the prochlorococcus live in nutrient rich areas and take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen like people always thought all the cyanobacteria did. This is in plain sight of us, right on the surface of the ocean. If the material we consider to be surface nutrient rich in the oceans continue to fade and the synechococcus start to flourish everywhere, these could become the dominant cyanobacteria using materials that would not be so beneficial to the human way of life. Mother Nature would have no problem here, the second string is in the right place at the right time. Usually the second string life forms that look like their regular cousins but use radically different energy sources are tucked away far out of sight. The sea life that likes 600 degree sulfurous water or frozen methane slush is far out of sight and so never considered to be an alternative type of life form that could populate the planet. Synechococcus on the other hand, is in plain sight and needs very little change compared to the other second stringers to become more prevalent.
.
Bacteria and associated sea life living in methane hydrate desposits.
Chemosynthetic bacteria produce food for communities of animals living in undersea thermal vents.
.
Some people believe that the ideal conditions we experience for life as we know it makes us part of some grand design with sunshine, blue skies, great clouds, green pastures, forever and ever. Instead there are a great many different varieties of environments where direct sunlight is not required and this is available for all kinds of creatures, most of whom would never consider having a human being in their family tree.
.
If the end of our life style as we know it comes about it is not the end of life on this planet by any means. The single cell community gave birth to the multi cellular creatures multiple times. There is still a lot of genetic variety left to make up some more multi cellular creations. And you don't even need sunlight for this life to thrive.
.
What is more interesting is that there microbes and multi cellular creatures ready to live in a world where darkness, extreme heat and a high concentration of sulfides and other minerals we would not consider normal is the norm. These residents of the hydrothermal systems on the ocean floors, spewing out plumes of superheated mineral-rich fluids, are the second string waiting their turn on the bench in case they are ever needed to quickly populate the planet Earth if it should ever find itself on the way into turning into another Venus.
.
And if it gets too cold, with too much methane and other hydrocarbon products floating around blocking out the oxygen and sunlight there is another set of second string players waiting in the bottom of the oceans living in cold undersea methane seeps using gas power and chemosynthesis. All kinds of worms, bacteria, mussels, shrimp, clams are down there waiting their chance when the varsity team creates the ideal conditions for some other kind of life form besides their own. Even some trilobites made use of alternate energy systems, such as sulfur based bacteria, during their long reign of existence.
.
Microbes do not grow weaker over time
Petri dish farms are places where animals are given drugs which are passed along into the soil where the local microbes absorb the drugs to boost their own immune systems. This immunity is then passed onto the global bacterial system.
.
Everything that is thrown away is food for the microbes. Everything includes everything ever made and the chemical compounds and all the by products used to make it. The microbes grow stronger they do not grow weaker. All life is living in a sea of microbes. The microbes could just as easily eat us as pass right through us. Some of the waste products of these microbes is called dirt. You are standing in it all the time. The dirt is also known as the pad and the pad does not have to be beneficial to the health of everything living in it.
.
As the pad becomes dangerous to people’s lives it does not actually have to be poisonous, it could just be harboring organisms that will not support our way of life.
.
The MRSA bacteria has become wide spread and able to survive in all sorts of environments. Originally only found in hospitals it has progressed to the point where it is now found in beach water and beach sand. It is already in the soil. This is only the first of many microbes which have used the chemicals we supplied them with to make themselves into super bugs which will limit our ability to move freely in our own land. These super bugs do not listen to legislation, they do not respond to iron bars, you can’t yell at them or call them names and you can’t ignore them as a means of controlling them. If you don’t respect them they can make you very sick. An unfortunate example of self replicating nano machines that were made by us and use the raw materials we give them but are not going to help us out anytime soon. The main feature of MRSA is that it is immune to some antibiotics, there are many other features that bacteria can pick up to become more successful and harder for us to manage.
Antibiotic resistance is only one feature for the successful existence
of bacteria. There are many other features, being horizontally
transferred that bacteria can acquire from other bacteria.
Able to exist in air instead of just liquid environments, to become airborne.
Able to extend the ph ranges they can survive in.
Acquire tougher physical construction of the cell wall.
Acquire resistance to many other substances besides antibiotics.
Co-operate with other organisms and micro organisms.
Be able to use former antibacterial agents and chemical substance irritants in their process of transforming energy.
Change to a close knit colony like structure to improve overall success,
such as films or blobs that protect the inner colony members from
external attacks or prevent easy dis-lodgement.
Acquire UV resistance.
Acquire radiation resistance by changing internal structure so damage is limited.
Generate toxins or other substances that ward off potential attacks or use of common resources.
.
.
Is Archaea the key to the future or the past? The Archaea are a group of single-celled micro organisms that are relatively unknown until recently. Starting in the 1970's people started identifying Archaea as something that lived in extreme conditions. As time went on Archaea was found in more and more places, and those places were less and less extreme until Archaea was found to be everywhere.
.
Then it was thought that Archaea might be the key to the future, the dark matter here on Earth that could fix everything. After all Archaea could get its energy from just about anywhere. They get their energy from organic compounds such as sugars, inorganic compounds, ammonia, metal ions, hydrogen gas, even sunlight. And some species of archaea fix carbon.
.
Possibly up to 20 percent of the total bio mass is archaea. Now there is something that can help fight global change battle. Just harness the archaea broncos and away we go on the way to victory or at least keeping the status quo. One funny thing though unlike the other domains, bacteria and organisms with a nucleus, archaea do not have the ability to form spores to get through any sort of situation that the future may turn into to. Archaea is a survivor, probably close to 3 billion years, so how does it do it, live life to the fullest without a back up plan?
.
It turns out archaea can wait almost forever to divide. It can develop a very robust skin to handle extreme heat, cold, acidity and alkalinity, even radioactivity. But that is not enough. It survives by adapting to what ever comes its way. It doesn't change its environment, it only makes life better for itself to survive by personally handling its environment but not greatly changing it. Archaea is probably involved with all the major cycles, sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, calcium, hydrogen, methane, and more.
.
Archaea probably keeps everything in balance by keeping everything moving and probably likes water a lot.
.
Archaea does not clean up pollution it lives within the pollution. It provides an elastic connection from one extreme to another providing continuity and stability in a changing environment which happens a lot more often than we think it does.
.
We are looking for something simple that will put a halt to changes we don't like happening, without really changing anything that really matters to us and unfortunately archaea probably does a better job of adapting than bringing the situation back to its original state. Which means back to the drawing board until we can genetically engineer something that will do what we want it to do.
.
Because archaea has been around for 3 billion years it has seen a lot of changes. The question is are all the different forms it has taken over the years contained within it's genetic code or does it have decentralized living samples scattered around and within the planet that carry the genetic information. People say there are a lot of gaps in the fossil record, perhaps they are looking in the wrong places to fill in the gaps. Things that changed the big life forms might also have changed the micro life forms and quite a few of them which may turn out to be living fossils.
.
It would be interesting to figure out the total weight of all the single celled plants and animals and figure out the total amounts of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, methane, ammonia, water, etc that they recycle everyday and otherwise use or dispose of. Is the single cell mass growing or shrinking like the ice caps, or does it rise and fall like the seasons, always coming back for more.
.
In one corner, would be the 7 billion, with the total material amounts that we the people process every day.
.
In another corner would be the insects, plants, and animals, and the total amounts of naturally processed materials.
.
Included would be the energy used and wasted, recycled and lost for each group.
.
How does the daily power output of the single celled machine compared to the multi cellulars efforts?
.
Going by power and materials used it is going to look like a pyramid with humans at the top, insects, animals and plants without congressional representation underneath the capstone, and then the base would be the single cell, microbial, viral, and any other micro size life forms contributing to the general makeup of the landscape.
.
The single cellular collection making up the base of the pyramid does not need the capstone to thrive and prosper but the capstone would be dead in the water without the base units to support it. The middle section is well, caught in the middle, but not capable of surviving without the base units, but can survive very nicely without the capstone. In other words, beings at the top of the food chain are not insured survival. The top has the least volume and so the least power.
.
Since the world is really changing we really should be asking ourselves, just who is this world being terraformed for? What life form currently here now will benefit the most from the way the planet is being changed? Prehistoric life, both animals and plants, lived in a carbon rich world which lead to their legacy of instant energy for human beings better known as oil, gas and coal. People have been pulling the petroleum products out of the ground where it was locked away. Once out of the ground the petroleum products are changed into items like plastic. The plastic is used and then discarded and then it breaks down into smaller and smaller size pieces. Some of the plastic breaks down into simpler components fairly fast and some of the plastic keeps its molecular identity for hundreds of years. The discarded plastic is making its way into the soil and water and oceans. The plastic breaks down into very small pieces which is ingested as food on purpose or accidentally where it then makes its way into many of the food chains, some of which people are part of. The plastic pollution is the oil being redistributed back into the environment by people. Since the mass of plastic being redistributed back into the environment is extremely large the question is what life forms like to eat plastic or like their environment contaminated with a broken down plastic bits.
.
The micro organism mass that covers the Earth is the planets oldest living inhabitant at a couple of billion years old and is constantly updating itself with genetic transfers designed to keep it in balance with the environment it lives in, shapes, and helps to regulate.
.
It adapts very well using everything from spores to super resilent membranes that last almost forever to survive whatever comes its way. Three plus billion years and counting is nothing to sneeze at. The mass of single cell life pollutes the planet with gases and organic wastes that result in the flow of oxygen, carbon dioxide, sulfur, nitrogen, water, all kinds of organic and inorganic compounds and the creation of new dirt.
.
Multicellular organisms live in the waste and pollution of the single cell organisms. The single cellulars eat everything put on their plate. Everything that comes out of the ground goes back into the dirt sooner or later. People throw everything away eventually.
.
The multicellular organisms increase the interaction rate of the single cell organisms. There are three main groups of organisms, the first and oldest are the original single cellulars that only need each other, they dont need the multicellular organisms or the single cell organisms that have adapted to the world of the multicellular creatures. The second group is the single cell organisms that need the multicellular creatures as part of their life cycle. The third group is composed of the multicellular creatures.
.
The relationship between the first group and the third group is completely one sided. The third group has always assumed that the waste from the original group would always be benefical to the third groups existence. Right now the dirt is sweet but someday it could become very sour.
.
Now is the time to invest in Martian mud flat real estate where the dirt is clean and the water is pure. Anyway that is what the advertising says.