Life on Earth and the Kortum Trail – Part I*

I sent Divided Core’s finest (and only) journalist out to the coast to file a report on the Kortum Trail area.  As usual, he missed the deadline, but this is what he wrote.

      Miraculously, the Earth is bursting with life.  Earth orbits within the circumstellar habitatable zone, or Goldilocks zone – falling not too close to, nor too far from the Sun, which is an enormous fireball that can theoretically accommodate 1.3 million Earth-sized planets within its blazing, spherical walls.  The Sun is like a massive cauldron of hydrogen and helium gas burning in a concentrated inferno 93 million miles away from Earth.  The Sun is a star, and it’s responsible for creating the gravitational field which holds the Earth and other planets in orbit.  Like the extensive network of life supported by its radiating solar energy, the Sun will one day die.  In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan examines the death of the Earth and Sun; the caption reads:

Several billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day (top left).  Then over a period of millions of years, the Sun will swell, the Earth will heat, many lifeforms will be extinguished, and the shoreline will retreat (top right).  The oceans will rapidly evaporate (bottom left) and then the atmosphere will escape to space.  As the Sun evolves toward a red giant (bottom right) the Earth will become dry, barren and airless.  Eventually the Sun will fill most of the sky, and may engulf the Earth. Paintings by Adolf Schaller.

        Shifts in the sun’s gravitational disposition may be responsible for tugging comets out of the Ort Cloud – which is one-quarter of the distance between our sun and the next closest star in the Milky Way Galaxy.**  One or multiple comets may have brought water to planet Earth after it began to form 4.5 billion years ago.  This is a speculation that makes sense because if the Earth formed in a chaotic, superheated, astronomical conflagration, then everything on the intensely hot rock would be burning or smoldering, and water from a crashing comet could have cooled everything down. 

        The point is that it took a lot of time, energy, and specific permutations for life to appear on Earth.  And it’s one thing for microorganisms, flora, and fauna to exist, but for life to evolve into conscious creatures which can appreciate the world around them is a spectacular occurrence.  Equally mind-blowing is that humans – seemingly still in search of a homeostasis with nature and each other, and exhibiting the highest form of intelligence – are possibly too smart for their own good, and can take a gift so supernal and sacred such as a living planet, and systemically destroy it.  (Insofar as harming life on Earth, certainly some people are more responsible than others, and those who are responsible may comprise a minitory whose inclinations are inconsistent with the rest of humanity.  My six-year old niece, for instance, shouldn’t bear much of the blame, nor should any child, for they seem to be the most tolerant and loving of any demographic; it’s the adults who cause the trouble.)  Not only have people formed industries and institutions which exploit or wipe-out vast natural habitats for the sake of creating favorable living conditions and amenities solely for our species, but we have constructed social and political paradigms which facilitate such spite and distrust for our fellow man that we continually kill each other while threatening the use of nuclear weapons to obliterate entire cross-sections of the planet.  So what do we do?  We go to the beach.

        If you’re lucky, you will go to a beach that lies along a clean and dynamic coast, impeded by only a few roads and sparse buildings, on a bright and sunny day when the water is clear and the sound of rolling waves wash your troubles away.  One can examine the coast on a macrocosmic scale and observe the relationships between the forests, hills, coastal prairies, cliffs, rocky shores, sandy beaches, and ocean.  Here’s a selection of pictures of the Kortum Trail area and coast, as well as two of the moon, which could be considered another dominant macrocosmic feature depending on your level of magnification.*** There are a few images of large rocks that are thought to have marks rubbed into them by the mammoths that roamed the Goat Rock area 40,000 years ago (mammoth fossils have been found at Bodega Head).  The other large arched rock is a sea stack formation, which indicates that it was once on the seafloor in some distant epoch of time tens of millions of years ago.

        Along the coast there’s plenty to see on the microcosmic scale, but you may have to do a little crawling around.  A close-up view is often necessary in order to appreciate things like lichen, moss, mushrooms, succulents, shells, and a variety of dazzling lifeforms flourishing in the tide pools.  (When scrutinizing natural objects close you may realize how much you’ve overlooked.  It’s somewhat like drawing an object in that you never truly realize how little or much you know about the way something looks until you try to draw it.)  In the following slideshow you can see everything I just mentioned and more, including a chiton in the upper-right hand corner of the tide pool shot.  I’m not sure what the stack of white particles is, but I think it may be a pellet of fish bones. 

         Some of the plants and animals that you see along the coast, and especially in the water, look as though they came from outer space.  This makes sense because we’re on Earth, which is a planet floating in space.  Simple multicellular organisms such as moss, fungi, and algae originate from a genesis tracing back billions of years.  Following on their heels were more complex organisms like sea anemones, sea stars, seals, and pelicans, which seem to have persevered in establishing a specific niche and role in the world.  Like people, the individual animals will live and die, and they have a stake in perpetuating the existence of their own species through procreation.  Like us, they have derived from the generations of their ancestors that came before them, and will strive to produce a generation of their species to follow in their footsteps.  Yet a dichotomy between us and them exists in that they can only do so much to prevent the destruction of their habitats and adapt to changes in their environment.  They’re mostly small, innocent creatures that haven’t done a damn thing to us; they haven’t wronged us in any way, and yet we are carrying-out the wholesale destruction of the lands and seas upon which they depend on to survive.  If the sea stars and harbor seals could talk, I suspect they would say something like, “Please, for the love of God, treat us with a little respect, because we’re all in this together, and there may be things that we are doing for you that you don’t even know of yet.  And if we disappear, then we’re done for, and that won’t bode well for either of us.”  Furthermore, I suspect some of the more desperate ones would issue a mandate to those humans who would listen, and it would go something like this: “Hello.  I’m different than you and your kind.  I’m just a seal, and I can’t do the things you can do.  I can’t speak out or act to stop what’s happening to us and the seas, so please help us.  Please do what you can to change things up there so that we can get by and survive down here.  I’m sorry I can’t help, but we’re just animals, for crying out loud.”

Asterisk Notes

*I sometimes fall into a habit of not exploring my own backyard because I know it’s always there.  But this is not the right way to go about things – it is taking something for granted.  Yet that something may change in the way in which it presents itself to you, and you yourself will not always be around to experience it.  With that mentally, I went back to the coast off the Kortum Trail the other day.  I went back with a sea kayak and my diving gear, determined to get camera footage of the coast from and under the water in order to complete the second part of this piece.  But I didn’t go in, because the sea looked like this.  So stay tuned for Part II.

**You won’t be able to find a photograph of the Milky Way Galaxy in full because we’re in it, and a camera hasn’t gone that far out in space yet.  The Milky Way galaxy is said to contain over 100 billion stars, and it's name has something to do with breast milk.  There are an estimated 100 billon galaxies in the universe, some containing hundreds of billions of stars.  Among astronomers, a commonly cited fact is that there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.  Our sun is of average size; click here for a neat video which shows how our Sun compares to others.

***In the lecture series Out of Your Mind, Alan Watts talks about level of magnification in a lecture called Awareness of the Self.  Here some of what he says:

        “…He sees, shall we say, that everything goes together.  And that is, in a way, by what we mean by relativity because relativity means relatedness – just as fronts go with backs and tops with bottoms, insides with outsides, solids with spaces – so everything that there is goes together.  It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it last a short time.  A galaxy goes together with all the universe just as much as a mosquito, which has a very short life.  From the standpoint of the self time is completely relative.  You can have, if you scale it down, as much time between two of those very rapid drum beats as you can in eons and eons and eons, it’s all a question of point of view, or, to use a scientific expression, level of magnification.  Change your magnification and you see molecules, and we know by other methods of observation that it can get smaller and smaller and smaller, and that the spaces between these minute units are so vast that they’re comparable to the distances between the sun and planets in scale.  So also with time, so in this sense, there could be vast, vast universes, full of empires, and battleships, and palaces, and brothels, and restaurants, and orchestras in the tip of your fingernail.  And on the other hand, we could be all going on in the tip of somebody else’s fingernail.
        It’s very important to understand not only the relativity of size and of time, but also of what there is.  Now as you know, the human senses respond only to a very small band of the known spectrum of vibrations.  We know through instruments of quite a vast spectrum, but we as I say with our senses see only a little of it.  If our senses were in some way altered, we would see a rather different looking world.  We can do this of course; we can put on special lenses to enable us to see heat, and then we see all the heat radiation coming out of people, and we say “Well, I’ve never noticed that about you before.”  But so in the same way, you see, there are infinitely many possibilities of vibrations, and of organs sensitive to those vibrations, so that there could be worlds within worlds within worlds, spaces within spaces, just like the many, many wavelengths of radio and television going on forever and ever in all directions.  The possibilities are infinite.”

Comments

[N8]

These are some great photographs! I agree with your quotes for the animals; most likely they would say something like that.

I do my best to explore and examine my surroundings because it is a great way to find something interesting or learn something cool.