You know you’re getting old when you look back on every past year and can only think about all the crap that went wrong, went foul, and went downhill from the already depressing lows of the previous crappy year. But 2016 stands out as a real stinker for all kinds of reasons. The latest being the death of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the same week. About the only things up are the stock market and average global temperatures. We’ll see how long the former lasts with the Trumpenstuff crew running the ship of state. Not to cast dismal prophecy, but the last time a “pro-business" GOP clown cart invaded the capital on a “mandate," it did not end well for the stock market or any other economic index.
But if it helps at all, maybe we should look at some really bad weeks, bad years, and bad eons from olden days, starting quite some time ago.
The most violent day on Earth was about 4.56 billion years ago. Back then a day was something like eight hours long, but in 4.56 billion BC, let’s call it a Monday, Terra wasn’t very firma, because it got clobbered by a wayward planet about the size of Mars. It’s a good thing there was no life at the time, every scrap of Earth was sterilized. The worst of the whole horrible event would have taken hours to play out. But the effects lasted, forever. One of them being our oversized moon: it coalesced from all the flotsam floating around after the great impact. It’s sobering to think, every time you look at it, that part of Earth’s mantle and crust is still up there, floating around, painting the night with a gorgeous, fleeting silvery light as it cycles through each month.
For a long time the moon was much closer than it is now, so close that it would have raised super-tsunami level tides, big enough to basically wash over the land every day. As if that wasn’t enough, 4.2 billion BC saw a dozen or so smaller bodies collide with Earth at the onset of Late Heavy Bombardment. Let’s say that started on a Tuesday, when the first really big one—maybe 400 miles wide—came calling. This episode would have vaporized whatever thin, cracked, fiery crust had managed to form under severe tides the new moon raised in the congealing rock. Once again sterilizing everything on the world and continuing for half a billion years or so. The weird thing is, the first geochemical signs of life come creeping into the record right on the heels of all that ultra-violence, about 3.8 billion years ago.
And speaking of those primitive mindless microbes, if you think humans are rough on the environment, be glad you weren’t alive in 2.3 billion BC. Around then, let’s say it was a Wednesday, photosynthesis had evolved and been greatly refined. It was a brilliant evolutionary development—for the first time, organisms could tap into limitless sunlight as a source of food. But there were consequences: these revolutionary cyano-bacteria released so much oxygen as a by-product into the primitive atmosphere that it overwhelmed natural processes for removing it, and the deadly gas steadily built up. Oxygen acted like a strong acid on every living thing it touched. This was chemical warfare waged on a global scale for eons, the great tree of life was pared way back, entire branches withered and died.
To add insult to injury, the planet’s delicate atmospheric and marine chemistry was so altered by the oxygen holocaust that it lost much of its ability to trap heat, plunging the whole world into vicious ice ages. The last one, beginning 650 million BC—let's say it officially started on a Thursday—was so extensive that the whole icy episode is called the Cryogenian Period and the final icy advance referred to as the Marinoan Glaciation. Latin-based terms that mean “Snowball” Earth.
It seems in retrospect that life, long held back by vast glaciers covering, arguably, every latitude, underwent a stunning burst of evolutionary innovation. In reality it took many millions of years, but by 500 million years ago the first animals and most major phyla had appeared. Mass extinctions came and went, but our distant ancestors colonized land along with plants and held onto that foothold, all were fruitful and did multiply. Until a quarter of a billion years ago: 250 million BC was a really, really bad year. So bad it’s called The Great Dying.
The majority of life on land and in the sea died off. The primary culprit seems to be a massive plume that rose from the Earth’s molten mantle and exploded onto the surface in a series of huge volcanoes—we might as well have fun with the theme and say this happened on a Friday, but it took a long time to get going and there was no one around to care if any weekends were ruined. Because one or more of these volcanoes wasn’t normal. It had a caldera the size of Montana and spewed toxic greenhouse gases for millennia. That event almost certainly triggered all kinds of secondary effects. But the upshot is temperatures shot up 20 degrees and oxygen levels plummeted.
Life recovered slowly after the Permian, but eventually new forms evolved, including dinosaurs, flowering plants, and little adorable critters called mammals. It was a fervent time, but this too, was doomed. About 66 million BC, literally on a single day, an object 10 to 20 miles in diameter blazed into the warm tropical sea on the eastern coast of modern-day Mexico kicking off the worst day, worst year, and worst century the biosphere had seen in some time. A few small groups of animals that could dig in and shut down, like crocs and turtles and frogs, made it. Others that could burrow in or fly away and quickly adapt, like small mammals and a few birds, managed to survive in scattered groups. But the large dinos and big marine reptiles were natural history. I hope it wasn’t a Saturday, because all Saturdays should be awesome.
Now in each of these terrible times, life found a way to not just survive, but to bounce back harder and higher than ever, all to our great benefit. The great impact gave us a moon and enriched the Earth’s molten iron core, creating a stronger, more persistent magnetic field that would protect the surface and atmosphere from being stripped by solar outbursts. The arid tableau left behind was seeded with critical organic chemicals, nucleic acids, and water delivered by fiery showers of comets and asteroids during the later bombardment. Scalding seas and electrical discharges made possible by prodigious amounts of surface water cooked up longer, more intricate chains of carbon-based molecules, until finally, one arose that could make a crude copy of itself.
Those simple replicators, stirred to life and distributed across the planet by ancient super tides, laid down the living foundations we all carry deep in our genes. Microbial collectives formed, made of the descendants of simple bacteria that first produced and later survived the oxygen disaster, and the first complex plant and animal cells were born. The gills and lungs, indeed the entire metabolism of metazoans, are only possible because of that free oxygen. Feathery dinos and their bird descendants went on to develop a clever turbo-charged respiration system, our mammalian lungs are powered by a big diaphragm, and both of those advances evolved in response to the anoxic aftermath of the Great Dying. Take away the K-T impact 66 million years ago, and there would be no lions and tigers and bears—or kangaroos or whales or people.
The Earth has certainly seen much, much worse times than one disappointing year (So has civilization; 1350 AD was no picnic). And the biosphere came back from each of those terrible times bigger and stronger and more diverse than ever. But those bad times wouldn’t have been much fun to live through, and in at least in that same spirit, if not in the same severity, neither was 2016 in my opinion.
Nevertheless, just as every new link in a chain utterly depends on its predecessors, we stand at the end of a long, long line of good times and bad. Remove a single one of them and the chain of life and events leading to us collapses. So here’s hoping 2016 is merely one of those necessary links leading onward and upward, to a happier, healthier, and far more fulfilling future, hopefully starting today, Jan 1, 2017. Happy New Year!