![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() |
||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape3. Earth Alive: An Ovular GaiaSphere Sustains Her/His Own Viability Skinner, Brian, et al. The Blue Planet. New York: Wiley, 1999. A basic, illustrated text on Earth System Science which includes a look at Gaian propensities. Smil, Vaclav. The Earth’s Biosphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. A proficient study covering physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, with an emphasis on symbiosis and the role of life’s complexity in biomass productivity and resilience. The influence of solar radiation and plate tectonics is discussed along with the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolisms. Sole, Ricard and Simon Levin. Preface. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 357/617, 2002. As an introduction to a special theme issue: “The Biosphere as a Complex Adaptive System.” Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems. As such, they display a number of recognizable, large-scale features that result from their dynamics being far from equilibrium…..suggestive of universal principles of organization. (617) Sowinski, Damian, et al. Exo-Daisy World: Revisiting Gaia Theory through an Informational Architecture Perspective.. arXiv:2411.03421. As the quote notes, University of Rochester astroecologists including Adam Frank propose an expanded version of this thought model set in a celestial realm so to gain further appreciations of how biospheres tend to self-regulate and maintain their organic viability. The Daisy World model has long provided a frame for understanding the self-regulation and feedback mechanisms of planetary biospheres. In this study, we extend the classic version through the lens of Semantic Information Theory (SIT), so to include the information flow between the biosphere and Earthly environment. Our aim is to develop novel methodologies to analyze the evolution of coupled planetary systems, with implications for astrobiological observations. Our Exo-Daisy World model reveals how correlations between the biosphere and environment intensify with rising stellar luminosity. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of our approach for developing detailed ExoGaia models of inhabited exoplanetary systems. Staley, Mark. Darwinian Selection Leads to Gaia. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 218/1, 2002. The adaptation to organisms to their environment leads in turn to an influence on their biotic niche. Steffen, Will, et al. The Emergence and Evolution of Earth System Science. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 1/1, 2020. In this inaugural issue of a new Nature journal, eight veteran Earth scientists including Jane Lubchenco, Hans Schellnhuber, and Tim Lenton provide a status report from V. Vernadsky’s biosphere to J. Lovelock’s Gaia alive model and onto current needs to foster an ecosphere vitality. See also Genealogies of Earth System Thinking by Giulia Rispoli in the same issue. Earth System Science (ESS) is an emerging transdisciplinary endeavour aimed at appreciating the structure and function of the Earth as a complex, adaptive system. Here, we discuss this integral merit of ESS, and it’s value for understanding global change. Inspired by early work on biosphere–geosphere interactions and by novel perspectives such as the Gaia hypothesis, ESS emerged in the 1980s to meet the need for a new ‘science of the Earth’. ESS has produced new concepts and frameworks which much serve environmental issues, such as the Anthropocene phase, tipping points and planetary boundaries. Moving forward, the grand challenge for ESS is to integrate biophysical processes with populous human dynamics to attain a truly unified vision of the Earth System. (Abstract) Stewart, Iain and John Lynch. Earth: The Biography. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007. A well done coffee table book as if the common cognitive intellect of Earthkind awakens to witness, with wonder and worry, its cosmic environs, harrowing past, and life’s perilous prognosis. Stueken, Eva, et al. Did Life Originate from a Global Chemical Reactor? Geobiology. 11/2, 2013. As “bioinformatics meets geochemistry,” astrobiologists from the University of Washington, McGill University, and NASA Exobiology, including William Brazelton and John Baross, describe an early earth scenario that seems primed and favorable for living systems to rise and prosper. Main prerequisites are: energy, organic carbon compound synthesis, catalysis, concentration, magma-hydrothermalism, metamorphic terrains, and more, as if an innate incubator. Many decades of experimental and theoretical research on the origin of life have yielded important discoveries regarding the chemical and physical conditions under which organic compounds can be synthesized and polymerized. However, such conditions often seem mutually exclusive, because they are rarely encountered in a single environmental setting. As such, no convincing models explain how living cells formed from abiotic constituents. Here, we propose a new approach that considers the origin of life within the global context of the Hadean Earth. We review previous ideas and synthesize them in four central hypotheses: (i) Multiple microenvironments contributed to the building blocks of life, and these niches were not necessarily inhabitable by the first organisms; (ii) Mineral catalysts were the backbone of prebiotic reaction networks that led to modern metabolism; (iii) Multiple local and global transport processes were essential for linking reactions occurring in separate locations; (iv) Global diversity and local selection of reactants and products provided mechanisms for the generation of most of the diverse building blocks necessary for life. We conclude that no single environmental setting can offer enough chemical and physical diversity for life to originate. Instead, any plausible model for the origin of life must acknowledge the geological complexity and diversity of the Hadean Earth. (Abstract) Stueken, Eva, et al. Mission to Planet Earth: The First Two Billion Years. Space Science Reviews. 216/Art. 31, 2020. As if some global cognitive faculty has landed on this world and is retrospectively trying to learn how it all came to be, nine astroscientists with postings in Scotland, Austria, Germany, Japan, and the USA, including Helmut Lammer discuss features such as From Magma to a Water Ocean, Onset of Plate tectonics, and more. Solar radiation and geological processes over the early million years of Earth’s history, along with the origin of life, steered our planet towards a long evolutionary course of habitability and the emergence of complex life. Crucial aspects included: (1) the redox state and volatile content of Earth’s geology, (2) the timescale of atmospheric oxygenation; (3) the origin of autotrophy, biological N2 fixation, and oxygenic photosynthesis; (4) strong stellar UV radiation on the early Earth, and (5) photochemical effects on Earth’s sulfur cycle. The early Earth presents as an exoplanet analogue that can be explored through the existing rock record, allowing us to identify atmospheric signatures diagnostic of biological metabolisms that may be detectable on other inhabited planets with next-generation telescopes. (Abstract excerpt) Tamura, Yoshihiko, et al. Advent of Continents: A New Hypothesis. Nature Scientific Reports. 6/33517, 2016. The entry reports three papers over ten years that quantify how unique is our planetary mantle of one-third mobile land forms amidst oceans over the crustal sphere beneath. This 2016 lead from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology cites a latest version. Formation and Evolution of the Continental Crust by the University of Grenoble geoscientist Nicholas Arndt in Geochemical Perspectives (2/3, 2013) is an 130 page essay fully available online. And thirdly, Evolution of the Continental Crust by the British earth scientists C. Hawkesworth and A. Kemp in Nature (443/811, 2006).
Tang, Qing, et al. Quantifying the global biodiversity of Proterozoic eukaryotes.. Science. Vol 386/Iss 6728, 2024. At years end, a global team of twenty Nanjing University, UC Santa Barbara and Riverside, University of Hong Kong and University of Missouri researchers provide a comprehensive empirical reconstruction of how life’s earliest prokaryote rudiments came to be and proceed on their arduous course to cells and organisms. In regard, a whole temporal scenario from this fraught advent all the precarious, meandering way to our worldwise description record just now being filled in. How rare and especial must our Earthuman ability to accomplishment of such an this ecosmic self-observation and record truly be, at the edge of 2025. The Proterozoic Eon [2500 to 539 Ma] is marked by many transformative evolutionary, environmental, and tectonic events. Here we report an analysis of the diverse evolutionary dynamics of Proterozoic and Cambrian eukaryotes. Our results provide deep insights into the coevolution of Earth and life in the Proterozoic Eon not possible earlier. The rise of animals coincided with the Shuram excursion (574 to 567 Ma) indicating a causal relationship between oceanic oxygenation. These various evolutionary fits and starts trajectories thus can now reveal the complex interplay in the Proterozoic Earth-life system. (Excerpts) Taylor, Stuart Ross and Scott McLennan. Planetary Crusts: Their Composition, Origin and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. With the burst of exoearth findings expanding and invigorating such studies, geologists from the Australian National University, and SUNY Stony Brook, here consider the wide range of coalesced, frozen surfaces around the fluid cores of orbital objects. Where are we anyway?
Previous 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 Next
|
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
HOME |
TABLE OF CONTENTS |
Introduction |
GENESIS VISION |
LEARNING PLANET |
ORGANIC UNIVERSE |