- October 11th, 2021, 2:14 pm
#396843
Time to get back to the thread topic after a bunch of 30baloney17 came up:
Anything Unusual About the Earth?
The sun’s been on fire for five billion years,
Its flares sometimes wreaking havoc. I looked,
Going there, close, but I didn’t get burned,
Which is all because I went at night.
The Earth free falls around the fiery sun,
A furnace whose output is as a thousand
Atomic bombs going off every second,
Most of that heat going off into space.
Earth is way out toward the edge of nowhere,
On the Milky Way’s Orion long arm,
With two billion stars and a huge black hole
In between it and a massive expanse.
Is any of this abnormal or strange?
A scarred and cratered moon made of Swiss cheese
Stabilizes Earth’s hot and freezing zones.
The moon’s soil is old, dusty and crusty,
Which is what happens when you leave cheese out.
Bacteria exuded oxygen that was
As a toxin to them, as plants did also,
Making an oxygen rich atmosphere,
This feat taking all of two billion years.
No one needed to breathe yet; is that weird?
It all seems normal enough, doesn’t it?
Bacteria are the welcome back door to
The the stomach’s cafeteria, as well as
The invincible rulers of the Earth.
For two billion years in the Archaean world, bacteria
Were the only forms of life. Algae, or Cyanobacteria,
Learned to absorb water molecules, dining on hydrogen,
But releasing oxygen as waste; photosynthesis began.
The world began to slowly fill with unwanted oxygen,
But not right away, as it first combined with iron,
To produce iron oxide that sank, and on the bottom lay,
In primitive seas, the world literally rusting away.
Aliens visited but then left right away,
Thinking the Earth was but a bunch of junk.
After 2 billion years, the atmosphere had much oxygen;
A new kind of cell arose. Some oxygen-using organisms
With organelles produced an energy much more efficient.
This was the endosymbiotic event of a mitochondrion
Which made complex life possible, by a liberation
Of energy from food, feeding on nutrients we take in.
We need them but they don’t need us, for without them
We couldn’t live for even two minutes.
They don’t even speak the same genetic language
As the cells in which they live.
These eukaryotes are old and unknown visitors
Within our homes who’ve stayed on for a billion years.
In another billion years they learned to form together
Into complex multicellular beings, yet, still this world
Of the small was to ever live on and rule the Earth.
At dinner, Louis Pasteur used a magnifying glass for
Searching for microbes in his food, until invited no more.
There are 100 quadrillion bacteria within us and upon us,
Ever grazing on our flesh and digesting our food bus.
The Earth is not our planet, but theirs; they let us live.
They even purify our water and keep the soil productive.
A single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 more a day.
They can also share information, taking a piece away
Of genetic code from any other any time. They swim
In a single gene pool—an invincible super-organism.
They live in caustic lakes, in Antarctica, in boiling mud,
And even thrive seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean;
In sulfuric acid, too, and in a 166-year-old bottle of beer,
And can even gorge themselves on plutonium nuclear.
Bacteria were yet alive in a sealed camera lens stowed
On the moon for two years, but they seemed a bit slowed.
Some were even found two thousand feet below the Earth
Dining on what’s in rocks, like iron, sulfur, and dirt.
Some frozen ones were even revived from the 3 million
Year-old permafrost of Siberia, and even one older than
The continents, was resuscitated, a 250 million-year-old
Bacterium that had been trapped in a salt deposit hold,
Two thousand feet underground in New Mexico,
But it was really walking mighty slow.
…
Typical near extinctions came and went, as usual.
Dinosaurs became the kings of all the creatures,
Dominating for hundreds of millions of years,
Which I have to say I wouldn’t really expect.
A regular type of Hell on Earth
Event soon befell, as is not so strange:
Hydrogen sulfide at 800 ppm leads to death,
Yet, paradoxically, we need it to survive.
We can detect it at even 0.0047 ppm;
It is the smell of rotten eggs.
Some 250 million years ago, the outlook
For life on Earth was very grim indeed.
The Permian Era was unrelentingly harsh
And the single most devastating
Extinction even was underway.
Carbon dioxide emissions
From massive volcanic eruptions
In Siberia had triggered
A chain of environmental changes
That had left oxygen levels
Dangerously low in the world’s oceans.
This shift in ocean chemistry was bad news
For oxygen-breathing marine species.
What purposeless fates were to befall life?
What sulfur fumes were to arise from the depths?
Anaerobic organisms such as green sulfur bacteria
Thrived and flourished under the low oxygen conditions.
Their success made the oceans all the more inhospitable
To its remaining aerobic inhabitants,
Since the bacteria generated
Vast quantities of hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
The lethal gas then diffused into the air,
Wiping out plants and animals on land.
By the end of the Permian Extinction
95% of marine species
And 70% of the terrestrial had perished.
The creatures that survived this Hellish catastrophe
Were the only ones who could tolerate H2S,
And, in certain cases, even consume it;
Thus, we humans have retained some affinity for it.
H2S increases the responsiveness of neural circuits,
And even protects stressed neurons.
It dilates blood vessels, controlling blood pressure
And protecting the heart.
It regulates contractibility
Of smooth muscle cells in the lungs,
And does the same for the small intestine,
Regulating movement of material through the gut.
H2S ‘hibernation’ can even
Protect vital organs from damage
Until energy supply levels return to normal,
Such as during trauma,
By helping to maintain a baseline metabolism.
We arose from Hell, once upon a time,
But brought a useful part of it along.
The Human Mammal Prescription Rx:
You can be made from what’s in a drug store bin:
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen,
A dash of sulfur, a little calcium and a pinch
Of a few other very ordinary atomic elements.
Your atoms don’t even care about you here;
They don’t even know that ‘you’ are there.
Your particular arrangement exists but once,
And you have only about 650,000 hours hence.
So, not much startling or astonishing going on,
But for all the follies and miseries of human history,
Such as World Wars, exterminations,
Depressions, repressions, preachers, and more.
Now the world is overflowing with people
Who had to be so fruitful and multiply,
So diverse as to be doing every crazy thing,
This perhaps disguising their being robots.
Now global warming, wild weather, fires,
Floods, big hurricanes, covid, and earthquakes,
But still the worst disaster of all—Trump,
On top of no ‘tranquility malapropos everything’.*
(*) Phrase by Sara
Also by Sara, which inspiried the poem: [Earth and life] A rock circling a mass of flammable gas floating in emptiness inhabited by organisms with a big mass of nerves connecting to one another in the most bizarre of ways in an attempt to explain itself like a dog chasing its tail.
- By Bethel Saint Bright
- By Sy Borg