Our Place in Time and Space

A roadmap for thinking about the vastness of time and space in the context of Earth, climate change, and all of us.

Welcome to the first installment of Paleoclimate. It’s great to have you here!

Paleoclimate is written by Dr. Tyler R. Jones, Ph.D.—a climate scientist specializing in ice core research in Greenland and Antarctica. Tyler has spent nearly a year of his life in remote polar field-science camps. Through his work, and that of thousands of other scientists, an intricate history of climate on Earth has been uncovered. Those Paleoclimate stories, spanning the entire 4.5 billion year history of Earth, are the subject of this newsletter.

To understand climate change on Earth, a good place to start is to discuss our place in time and space.

There are four things you should know:

1. Time is immense. Human evolution and the rise of civilizations comprises only a very small part of the history of Earth, or the universe.

2. Earth’s climate has changed dramatically prior to humans, ranging from ‘hothouse’ worlds with no ice anywhere on the surface of the Earth, to ‘snowball’ worlds with almost the entire surface of the Earth covered in ice.

3. For modern societies, we have built our cities, agricultural systems, and access to water around a very narrow range of climate. By perturbing the climate, as we are doing now through the burning of fossil fuels, we endanger the stability of societies and risk our quality of life. Civilizations of the past have collapsed in the face of much less.

4. Humans are resilient, fantastic, and creative, and we will solve the climate change problem, but there will be some hard times ahead.

Turning to the idea of time. As far as we know, our universe is about 13.77 billion years old, and Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. These numbers really have no meaning to us as humans, since our lifespan is only about 100 years. To wrap our heads around the topic of time, let’s condense all of cosmic time into a traditional calendar year. Here, January 1 represents the Big Bang, and Sept 2 represents the formation of Earth. We can then fill in other Earth-centric events in this calendar.

Jan 1 - Big Bang
… (wow, a lot of stuff happened in here we don’t know much about)
Sept 2 - Formation of Earth
Sept 20 - Beginning of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe
Dec 16 - Cambrian Explosion
Dec 28 - Antarctica is a rainforest
Dec 29 - K-T Boundary (asteroid strike, dinosaurs go extinct)
Dec 31 at 10:43 pm - Homo Erectus (upright man) appears in the fossil record
Dec 31 at 11:29 pm - Start of ice core records from East Antarctica
Dec 31 at 11:59:37 pm - Most icy part of the last ice age
Dec 31 at 11:59:50 pm - Akkadian Empire, Mesopotamia
Dec 31 at 11:59:57 pm - Mayan Civilization
Dec 31 at 11:59:59 pm - Anasazi Culture
Happy New Year to us in the present day!!!

The list above is just a start, and in future newsletters, we will discuss all of these things and more! There is really just so much to talk about, and it makes me very excited. As I love to do, I will include creative-asides about art and popular culture in all of my writings.

Now let’s talk about space. The universe is vast and expanding. Looking up at the stars, especially far from the blur of city lights, you can see the Milky Way splashed across the sky. Fathoming the vastness of our universe, or even the Milky Way, is fundamentally impossible: we are far too small. So, how can we think about Earth within the universe? One way is to look at recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is returning some spectacular high-resolution and deep-time images of our universe. However, I prefer to think closer to home…

Two of my favorite photos ever taken are of Earth from space.

1. Earth from the moon.

   

   “Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and some of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. Fifty years to the day after taking the photo, William Anders observed, "We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth." Nature photographer Galen Rowell described it as "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". [Wikipedia, Public Domain, NASA]

2. Earth from deep space.

   

   “Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers. Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan. In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of space, among bands of sunlight reflected by the camera.” [Wikipedia, Public Domain, NASA]. Note that you will find Earth in the orange colored sunbeam. Sagan later pointed out in a speech at Cornell University, October 13, 1994, that "all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home."

Looking at the photos above, it is not hard to come to the realization that life on Earth is fragile, surrounded by an immense and inhospitable space. Even having a visual awareness of Earth from space, which has only been possible for humans in recent decades, can be life changing. Truly, for me, seeing the photos above is spellbinding, and there is a term for this feeling. The Overview Effect describes the cognitive shift in perspective that people experience when they see Earth from space. This shift in awareness can impart a profound sense of unity, and a responsibility to be stewards of the planet. Take the following quote from a NASA astronaut as one instance of the Overview Effect.

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

― Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

So that’s it, a starting point for considering our place in time and space. We are a species that evolved in Africa, spread around the globe, built civilizations, and then developed technologies to leave the safety of our planet, walk on the moon, and land rovers on Mars. We live on a big planet, but within the vastness of space, our planet is small, seemingly fragile, and worth protecting. It is quite the juxtaposition, really.

One consequence of human ingenuity is that we are capable of reconstructing the history of our world by examining the chemical composition of rocks, sediments, ice, old trees, and more. Many forensic tools, used in laboratories all over the world, allow us to unlock the mysteries of geologic time. As the future unfolds, it is worth knowing where we came from.

I look forward to sharing more with you next time, and please consider supporting this newsletter.

Sincerely, 

TRJ, PaleoClimate Scientist