Just Thinking...

We came across the program How the Earth was Made on History Channel recently. Although it was made in 2007, it had flown under my radar. I found it fascinating showing graphically the history of our earth.

The movie takes what we know geologically and biologically about earth's history from the start (4.5 billion years ago) and lays it out visually but without emotional interpretation. It didn't attempt to answer the why or what it meant, nor guess where it's going (beyond the eventual extinction as earth's future is tied to the sun's) but just what can we know from geologic and fossil records.

In watching the show, the mystery, for me, involved why life developed at all. Those first celled beings and then the others that followed. Why did they 'just' appear especially in such a hostile environment? What made dinosaurs develop? I know they were supposedly the best adapted is science's answer to that but were they or was somebody playing around?

Each time there would be a dominant species, going along, feeling like they had it all under control and then boom, a cataclysmic (and when earth delivers cataclysm, it really means cataclysm) event whether from space or earth itself and it all changed again.

What a violent, exciting earth we live upon, and make no mistake, despite the ego of man, we do just live upon it with very little real control over what it does or what comes from space.

Because the show doesn't attempt to draw conclusions, it leaves the viewer with some interesting questions. The big one for me is the first one. What made life appear, those first single-celled living beings and in such an inhospitable environment?

Did the seeds of life come from outer space which is certainly possible given they believe the water on this planet came that way. Meteors bring in many things-- maybe not all good. One of them might have been the seeds of life-- if so, from where did it come? Could another meteor bring our human history to an end as it did the dinosaurs? The end could as well come through a new bacteria as a climate driven result.

Some, who don't like mystery and want definitive answers, would say diversity came because of competition. Whatever the reason behind it, in each of these past stages, something changed so dramatically that it would kill off most of what lived in that time-- leaving a new form of life to evolve. Eventually that led to the age of man-- short in time though it might be given our destructive nature. We don't need a meteor to wipe ourselves out.

To me, the facts laid out in the film, with all the thinking about its meaning, added to the mystery. I personally don't see evolution as proving atheism or belief. It is a fact and then we interpret it or we don't. Drawing conclusions that it means there is no god or it means there is, to me it doesn't work.

Life is. Isn't that enough? For now, we are here. Evolution doesn't tell us our end anyway-- just that there will be an end but then a new beginning-- somewhere for something. How fascinating.

If you get a chance to see How the Earth was Made, definitely I recommend it. It brings earth's beginnings vividly to life and leaves as many questions as answers-- as is right given the complexity of the events.

[Beginning today, we will be on the road for awhile. First Thanksgiving with our family and then heading south to Tucson with our two cats. They hate travel and have been holing up ever since the pet carriers came out. This will be an adventure for them but one they aren't choosing. One of our neighbors is looking after the farm; so we have this chance to get the Tucson house set up hopefully as a rental for others.

I had pre-written some blogs on subjects that interested me; so they will keep flowing along every other day. For now, I am leaving comment moderation off; but if I check in on the way down and find too much spam, I will have to activate it. I go for a long while with none but lately I have been deleting quite a bit. Fortunately most of it is in earlier blogs which makes the blogger system easy to just reject it; but there is no way to do that with the current ones.]