Gaia is Made of Stardust

All of the chemical elements that make up our solar system, except hydrogen and helium, were once inside the bellies of stars that lived and died before our sun was born. All of the carbon in our cells, all of the calcium in our bones, all of the iron in our blood, all of the oxygen that we breath was once inside stars that have lived and died. This is cycle of birth, grown, death, and regeneration is our cosmic story.

Before the Beginning

In a swirling spiral of gas, heat, and light, a tiny grain of dust that was Gaia's seed danced and swirled. Throbbing and pulsing with an electric passion, she drew to her other grains, other seeds, until together they formed a ball, spinning and dancing in the lens of radiance that was to become the sun. The dancers flung out their arms, swirled their skirts, bumped up against each other, and fused. Growing larger and larger, spinning and dancing faster and faster, they were drawn toward each other by the passionate pull of gravity, at times colliding in a fiery death, at other times in a mating union, until at last the planets congealed into their orbits, circling a fiery sun.

Gaia was hot, her surface erupting in plumes and rivers of fire, her face bombarded by missiles of rock that left her pockmarked with craters and seeded with ice and the chemical prototypes of life. Slowly, slowly, she cooled down. On her surface, packets of energy frozen into form combined and recombined. Ice melted to primordial seas that washed a rocky shore. Lightning struck. Waves rolled to shore and retreated; the soup of energy was boiled and cooled, dried and immersed, again and again. Bubbles formed thin skins that enclosed crystalline strands of frozen energy, organized in a radically new way: a way that conveyed information, that communicated instructions for reproducing itself. The double helix of DNA was life's first great creative leap, the one that allowed all others to follow. Life was born.

The Gift of the Ancestors

Life on earth was still relatively new. At first, simple, one-celled beings filled the seas, living by changing the energy patterns around them, breaking down large molecules–complex clumps of dancing energy and form-into smaller clumps, using the energy released to move and dance. They filled the seas in promiscuous abundance, constantly exchanging bits of DNA, sidling up to one another and crooning the bacterial equivalent of "Hey, hey hey, baby ... the thought of trading genes with you drives me c-crazy!" They formed one life-whole, one global gene pool, one planetary well of information and experimentation.

But after a time, life reached a crisis point. life began to run out of food. There weren't enough of those complex molecules for all of life to continue, and life began to starve and die.

Yet life has always been inventive, creative. Those simple, one-celled beings were already experimenting with different forms. Some were long and skinny and wriggled and swam. Some were round and far. Some adapted to hot and some to cold. And always they were trading genes, shifting forms, changing and transforming. At that time, there wasn't yet a brain on the planet, yet life came up with something so brilliant, so amazing, that it transformed the whole nature of existence and the atmosphere itself.

Life invented a mandala. A beautiful molecule, like a patterned flower, with a magic quality. For when a photon of sunlight struck the heart of this pattern, it began to vibrate and shiver and set off a chain of reactions that harvested the sun’s energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into food. Chlorophyll and the process of photosynthesis were life's next great invention, and the green things, the sunlight-harvesters, were born.

Green things filled the seas and the crevices of the shores, flung a smear of filmy life over rock and sand. Life flourished as never before.

But there was one problem. The miraculous process that used sunlight to make food gave off a waste product, a toxic gas that burned and destroyed everything it touched. And as life grew, over hundreds of millions, a billion, then two billion years, the very air became polluted by this gas, so that life would no longer avoid its touch of death.

But life continued to experiment and invent. Some of those tiny creatures dug down in the mud to avoid the toxic gas. Some clumped together for protection.

And some discovered another miracle: that by reversing one of the moves in the dance of photosynthesis, a new process could be born–one that could take the toxic gas, which we call oxygen, and use it to burn food and make energy.

And so the breathers were born, those who dine on the sunlight-harvesters, burning their bodies as fuel for life. In burning food, the breathers give off carbon dioxide, which the green things (with the help of the sun) transform to food again. And the green things give off oxygen, which the breathers use in burning food. Gaia began to breathe, passing her breath back and forth from red to green, continuing to build up oxygen, to transform herself.

And after millions of years, the breathers took the mandala of chlorophyll, switched the atom at its heart to iron, and formed the hemoglobin that swims in the cells of our red blood. And so the cycle is complete, and the earth breathes in and out, red to green to red.

And this air we breathe is a gift of the early ancestors. With each breath in, we take in the results of their great creativity. With each breath out, we give back.

And the balance is so perfectly kept that oxygen remains at just the right amount to sustain life. For if there were only a few more percentage points of oxygen in the air, any spark would light a fire that would ignite the whole atmosphere. And if there were only a few percentage points less, no fire would ever burn and we could not live.

Cooperation and Complexity

Breathers added something new to life's dance. The sunlight-harvesters floated in a womblike sea that contained the elements they needed to make food. The energy they needed showered down from the sun. Life was easy, and they could simply be and receive.

But breathers needed to find food, from the dead bodies of the sunlight, harvesters or from living ones. They had to be more mobile, more aggressive, pursuing and engulfing and penetrating before they could digest and dissolve their prey.

Every now and then, an aggressive breather penetrated a life-form that did not dissolve. Or took in someone it could not digest. And instead of eating each other, the life-forms coalesced and supported each other.

A breather might make food more efficiently for a scavenging bacterium.

A sunlight harvester and a breather might team up, to make best use of all possible sources of energy.

A long, skinny, wriggling creature might bury its head in this new, larger cell and provide mobility in exchange for food. A hundred, a thousand, tiny creatures might team up to become one larger being, pooling their crystalline DNA library of instructions into one central core.

And a new form of life was born, still single-celled but a thousand times larger than what had gone before, and far more complex. The eukaryotes were born, the cells with a nucleus that are the ancestors of all larger creatures.

This new collective form opened up a wide realm of possibilities for life. For two billion years, simple bacteria had been the only model of life; now life began to experiment and change.

One of the first experiments was sex. Bacteria invented a simple form of sex, trading genes like bits of gossip throughout a worldwide pool. The variations created by this process allow them to change and evolve. When they reproduce, however, the process is still simple: each cell simply replicates itself and buds off an identical copy.

The eukaryotes each had a center, a nucleus that held a library of genetic information, arranged in paired chromosomes of DNA. Now they learned to divide those pairs, to split the deck before reshuffling. And each half-set of genes could combine with the half set from a different individual. Sexual reproduction was born. And became very popular.

These new cells began to build on their cooperation to form colonies. Some learned to take minerals from seawater and spin elaborate spheres of intricate, crystalline forms. Some pioneered the branching patterns of roots, the flat planes of leaves. Some built the first true bodies made of many cells, linked by the communication tubes of nerves.

And 580 million years ago, life exploded in variety. Life grew legs and began to walk on the sea floor and the shoreline. Life spun shells in elaborate, ornate forms, tried out taps, fins, flippers, segments, carapaces, and antennae. And this burgeoning life grew weirder, more delightful, more strange than all of succeeding life put together.

Until disaster hit. A meteor hit, or massive volcanoes belched smoke into the air, covering the earth with a blanket of cloud that first blocked the sun, then warmed the atmosphere. Something changed the earth's climate, and, in a great extinction, 90 percent of life on earth died.

What survived was not as diverse, not as inventive. But life tried out many variations on a few basic patterns and again began to grow and evolve. The seas were filled and the land was colonized. Dinosaurs roamed great forests of ferns, and winged lizards soared through the skies.

Then, some vast time later, another meteor crashed into the earth, leaving a great crater a hundred miles wide, and the dinosaurs died. Their small descendants, lizards and birds, still prowl and soar. A small, humble, shrew like mammal that survived the cataclysm gave rise to mice and deer, tiger and mammoth, bison, horse, ape, and us.

And here we are, with our thumbs and our big brains, inventive, creative, aggressive, aware in some ways, oblivious in others, still struggling to learn the lessons our ancestors bequeathed us: That everything changes. That everything is interdependent. That we survive by cooperating, sharing resources, pooling information. That change can come suddenly, cataclysmically, and when it does, the small are better fit to survive than the large. That when faced with great crisis, life is capable of great invention. That we are no less creative than the crystals that invented DNA, no less artists than the bacteria that shaped chlorophyll.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2008 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

The Gaia story of the evolution of life on earth comes from Starhawk’s 2004 book The Earth Path. Sharhawk got her input from James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Elisabet Sahtouris's book Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution. To learn more about how we are made of stardust see Michael Dowd’s inspiring book Thank God for Evolution. It merges science's and religion’s stories of evolution.

Wikipedia
Bacteria
Breathing
Carbon dioxide
Cell Nucleus
Chlorophyll
Chromosomes
DNA
Eukaryotes
Gene
Hemoglobin
Molecule
One Cell Microorganism
Oxygen
Photon
Photosynthesis

James Lovelock
The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth

Starhawk
The Earth Path

Elisabet Sahtouris and James Lovelock
Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution

Michael Dowd
Thank God for Evolution