Oxygen Earth Quotes

The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.

oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.

What keeps earth air breathable? Not oxygen alone. The earth is a freer place to breathe in, every time you love without calculating a return -- every time you make your drudgeries and routines still more inefficient by stopping to experience the shock of beauty wherever it unpredictably flickers.

The temperature jumped another ninety degrees. Why couldn't anyone see in my life how awesome Noah was? I shoved up my sleeves, welcoming the cold air on my skin. "Echo, stop!" Ashley propelled her self out of the gliter. I froze and then remembered Ashley was damaged. I was going on a date, not to Vegas to elope. Noah's strong hand slipped over my wrist before he entwined his fingers with mine. The sensation of warm flesh against an area I allowed no one to see, much less touch, caused me to shiver. My eyes widened, realizing my mistake. This is what had freaked Ashley out. What had come over me? I never pulled up my sleeves. I spent all my time pulling them down. When had I become...comfortable? He rubbed his thumb over my hand. "I planned on taking her to my house to meet some of my friends." Noah could have told them he was getting me to the ghetto to buy us crack and they wouldn't have heard him. Ashley stood in place, staring at my exposed scars as my father stared at our combined hands. I reached over to pull down my sleeve, but Noah casually placed his hand over my forearm, preventing me fron doing it. My lungs squeezed out all the oxygen in my body. Noah Hutchins, in fact, a human being, was overtly, on purpose, touching my scars. I'd stopped breathing moments ago, as had Ashley. Noah continued as nothing earth-shattering had happened. "What time does Echo need to be home?" Blinking my self back to life, i answered for them, "My curfew is eleven." "Twelve." My father stood and extended his hand. "I didn't have a chance to properly introduce myself earlier. I'm Owen Emerson.

Everything in the universe comes from stars. Before anything else existed, there were just stars. Stars are like ovens,” she says. “Inside, they’re cooking planets and asteroids, and when they explode, out spews all this, like, space vomit that’s been cooking all these years. And solar systems formed, and Earth formed, and algae and eventually oxygen. And small organisms evolved into big animals and after about a billion years we came out, so that’s your answer. We come from the stars.

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.

In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.

We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate.

Life and water are inseparable. Three quarters of the earth's surface is covered by water, just as three quarters of your body is made up of water. Even in the driest desert where rain may come just once every few years, the cycles of life are based on waiting for the arrival of water. Our bodies are not so patient. Every cell in your body needs water to survive, and that means that drinking plenty of clean, fresh water can make you stronger healthier and smarter. Water carries oxygen and fuel to your cells, lubricates your joints, regulates your body temperature, and plays a key roll in just about every function of your body. My number one roadie, POODIE, says, "You can't make a turd without grease.

We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.

In Sri Lanka, when two strangers meet, they ask a series of questions that reveal family, ancestral village, and blood ties until they arrive at a common friend or relative. Then they say, "Those are our people, so you are our people." It's a small place. Everyone knows everyone. "But in America, there are no such namings; it is possible to slip and slide here. It is possible to get lost in the nameless multitudes. There are no ropes binding one, holding one to the earth. Unbound by place or name, one is aware that it is possible to drift out into the atmosphere and beyond that, into the solitary darkness where there is no oxygen.

Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.

Change is the nature of nature,'" she read. "'For example, stars expand as they grow older. They grow from a star, to a red super-giant, to a supernova. When a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the explosion dispenses different elements-helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, nickel-across the universe, scattering starduest. That stardust now makes up the planets, including ours.

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and spoils'--of importance only within four walls. A tame animal--in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.

As he spoke, the edges of the clay man began shimmering, like air does in intense heat, and the lumpen form gradually became more manlike. "Something's happening!" I cried. I was paralyzed by shock and hope. "Please let it work. Come back, Vincent. You have to come back, I whispered, pleading. Red clay became olive-toned skin, and the bald head became waves of raven black hair. The face that Jules had carefully sculpted became a real nose and mouth and eyes, closed as if in sleep. But it lay there, still unmoving, until, focusing on the air just above, Bran yelled, "Come, bardia spirit, inhabit this body!" He made one final sweeping gesture, as if pulling the aura downward, and touching his fingers to the body's side. The eyes flew open and Vincent took a great gulping gasp, as if trying to swallow all of the oxygen in the room. "Vincent," I said, my heart in my throat. His eyes flew to mine. He reached toward me, and I took his hand and pressed it to my cheek. His skin was burning hot, like with a fever. I kissed his fingers, and his skin smelled like fire and rain-soaked earth. Like the boy I thought I would never touch again.

Waiting for him I check behind me, to be sure I haven’t accidentally activated my backup tank of oxygen, and that’s when I notice the universe. The scale is graphically shocking. The colors, too. The incongruity is stupefying: there I was, inside a small box, but now—how is this possible?

So that’s the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days. If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

He wasn't Sirius. He was planet Earth. He was oxygen. He was everything.

Imagine two astronauts go to the moon, and while they’re there, there’s an accident and their ship can’t take them back to Earth. They have only enough oxygen for two days. There is no hope of someone coming from Earth in time to rescue them. They have only two days to live. If you were to ask them at that moment, “What is your deepest wish?” they would answer, “To be back home walking on our beautiful planet Earth.” That would be enough for them; they wouldn’t want anything else. They wouldn’t think of being the head of a large corporation, a famous celebrity, or the president of the United States. They wouldn’t want anything but to be back here—walking on Earth, enjoying every step, listening to the sounds of nature, or holding the hand of their beloved while contemplating the moon at night. We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from dying on the moon. We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious, beautiful planet. Zen Master Linji said, “The miracle is not to walk on water or fire. The miracle is to walk on the earth.” I cherish that teaching. I enjoy just walking, even in busy places like airports and railway stations. Walking like that, with each step caressing our Mother Earth, we can inspire other people to do the same. We can enjoy every minute of our lives.

You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?” “I know it’s necessary for life.” “It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!” Hammond looked irritated. “So what is your point? That modern pollutants will be incorporated, too?” “No,” Malcolm said. “My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines.… It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth—because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another.

We fail to see the oneness of all things, and because of this, we unknowingly cause a lot of harm to ourselves. We pollute the Earth that we live on, cut down the trees that produce our oxygen, destroy the ecosystems of nature and the animals that maintain them, and we mistreat and harm each other, thinking that these destructive actions will not have a direct effect on us.

Don’t forget that the land is always out there, making its way, doing everything it can so you can breathe fresh air; so you can eat fresh food; so you can move and see and feel and think, and it’s on your side. The world is out there doing what it’s been doing way before you came here, it’s firm and strong and it takes a lot to bring it down. so from time to time, just go outside and look at this spectacle. This pure painting right in front of your eyes. No one created it. No one owns it. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It simply is. So maybe, try a little tenderness. Just give it a chance to do what it can do. Just let it help you breathe and eat and move and see and maybe just try to live your life in a way that doesn’t kill this force of nature that is just trying to give you a world worth living in. A clean world. A fresh world. Paths, forests, oceans, animals, oxygen, water. That’s all it takes. Just try a little tenderness towards this world we’ve been lucky enough to build our homes on. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.

For 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent—enough to allow the development of other, more complex life-forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real.

It’s funny, grief, isn’t it? How you die with them. Whoever you were before has gone. Your ghost walks the earth. You look the same, sound the same, but are not the same. You don’t breathe oxygen the way you did before. You negotiate life under an ocean. Drowning as you do your shopping, drowning as you ride the bus, drowning as you go to work. You can’t live with this, you think. No one could live with this. It’s unliveable. Then there are moments when your head rises above the water. You find something funny, laugh. A glimpse of your previous self. Until you are submerged once again. Guilty for your brief ability to breathe. Over time the water levels drop. First you tread water; then you swim; then you wade; then you are paddling; until finally you are walking alongside a stream. It flows next to you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, however happy you’re feeling, it’s there.

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear.

I’m dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by. I’m dead, Makina said to herself, and hardly had she said it than her whole body began to contest that verdict and she flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved. Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the the cellar.

These early, single-celled organisms unwittingly transformed Earth’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into one with sufficient oxygen to allow aerobic organisms to emerge and dominate the oceans and land.

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, A luminous sphere of plasma Held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, Waiting to be released back into the sky, Waiting to go back in the reverse Direction from which I came, Traveling through a warm tunnel of light, And out into a cold, dark abyss Where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, And the magnetic dust that carries my Heart and spirit will lift us back To congregate and shine With the stars. Home again, In the fluorescent Kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by My soul’s true name. And my heart, It will flicker again, With every memory from its many Lifetimes, And with every wish Made by a child. SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem

Quoting geneticists, Guy Murcia says we’re all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murcia also describes out kinship though an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and-owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation- over a year’s time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as everyone who ever lived. (The Seven Mysteries of Life)

These same oxygen atoms, normally found in pairs (O2), also combined in threes to form ozone (O3) in the upper atmosphere, which serves as a shield that protects Earth’s surface from most of the Sun’s molecule-hostile ultraviolet photons.

I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. “Working the problem” is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the “warn, gather, work” protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn’t just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts.

We humans may think of ourselves as solid objects, all flesh and bone. But take a close look, and it’s clear our bodies are composed largely of oxygen and hydrogen. We are essentially ephemeral – akin as much to wind water, and fire as to earth.

There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.

The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.

Ah," Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. "Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world--we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

What makes the Earth remarkable is not its position in the universe—many Earth-size planets orbit their stars close enough for liquid water to exist—but what inhabits it. It is not just the Earth’s liquid blue oceans but its vast desert plains too; the oxygen-rich atmosphere and solid molten core; the millions of species and the complex, diverse ecological systems—all of which combine in an exquisite, unique dance to make the Earth special.

What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.

It is a mistake to believe that life cannot exist without water and oxygen. Even on our own earth there are forms of life that need no oxygen. They are called anaerobic bacteria. A given amount of oxygen acts like poison on them. Why should there not be higher forms of life that do not need oxygen?

We are made of atoms. With each breath you inhale a million billion billion atoms of oxygen, which gives some idea of how small each one is. All of them, together with the carbon atoms in your skin, and indeed everything else on Earth, were cooked in a star some 5 billion years ago. So you are made of stuff that is as old as the planet, one-third as old as the universe, though this is the first time that those atoms have been gathered together such that they think that they are you.

India was and to some extent, still is, a nation where its citizens care more about their religious freedom than any other earthly possession. Give them food or not, it doesn’t matter to them, as long as they are allowed to practice their religion. But, take away their religion, they will fight till the last breath of their life.

What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe? "The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth. The atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…

I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, a luminous sphere of plasma held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, waiting to be released back into the sky, where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, and the magnetic dust that carries my heart and spirit will lift us back to congregate and shine with the stars. Home again, in the fluorescent kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by my soul’s true name.

Working the problem” is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen.

The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth,

Incidentally, I'm puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, thing didn't burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did.

Incidentally, I'm puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, things didn't burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did

It's like we are underground, in a cemetery....the sky is the earth... We are hibernating, sleeping all the time and we don't know it. We are dreaming that there is plenty of oxygen.

The revolution begins with a walk in the woods. How did it ever come to pass that we would forget the names of the living things that manufactured oxygen, purified the air and water?

You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’ She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’ ‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.

Energies and emotions affect physical reality just like sound, and gravity, and electricity, and music, and oxygen do. They breathe, and expand, and throb, and rush, even if we cannot name or understand them. It doesn't matter where we're from, or what we believe, or what language we speak. Millions of us are feeling and exact same way, right now, and we are united because of it.

Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes.

A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae—an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables—was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen.

Maybe one day, in some future now, someone will read what I have written and learn of our existence. That we were part of a Sacred Sisterhood and lived on a sliver of land that remained pure, resplendent, thanks to the piety of the Enlightened. Or maybe they’ll become dust and return to the earth, fertilizing it, nourishing the roots of a tree, and our story will be understood through the leaves that oxygenate the collapsed world.

The macromolecules of organic life embody information in an intricate structure. A single hemoglobin molecule comprises four chains of polypeptides, two with 141 amino acids and two with 146, in strict linear sequence, bonded and folded together. Atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and iron could mingle randomly for the lifetime of the universe and be no more likely to form hemoglobin than the proverbial chimpanzees to type the works of Shakespeare. Their genesis requires energy; they are built up from simpler, less patterned parts, and the law of entropy applies. For earthly life, the energy comes as photons from the sun. The information comes via evolution.

One of these individuals, whose apparently divine subjective experience of transcendence led to the birth of one of the relatively modern religions of planet earth, was a man named Nanak. In an effort to diminish the contemporary conflicts between the Hindus and the Muslims, he ended up becoming the founding patriarch of yet another circle of religious ideologies – Sikhism – a child religion born from the wedlock between Hinduism and Islam.

The religious man will constantly look for the proof of Heaven and Hell; while the atheist man will constantly look to disprove Heaven and Hell. And they go on like that, locked-head in battle, both battling for beliefs that really cannot be proven. Neither the existence nor the non-existence of Heaven and Hell can be proven. And soon they will all be dead. And nobody will know where they go to, except they themselves who die. And so the battle continues, as it always has. And why should I join either side? If there is a God Almighty, I should imagine Him not needing human beings made out of carbon to believe in Him. What use to God would our species be? If He loves us, then He will love us because He chooses to love us. Never because He needs us to believe in Him. It wouldn't make any difference whatsoever, to an Almighty God, if carbon species breathing oxygen believed in Him or not. If He wanted to love the species then He just would. Regardless of their own persuasions. And if there is not an Almighty God, then it would not matter if I joined such a battle, either. Either way, why would I join such a cursed downward spiral? The truth that we do know for sure, is that it is our responsibility and it is in our best interest, to live our lives in such a way that creates Heaven on Earth and puts Hell on Earth far away.

And now I need To do something Excessively Indian So I will name All of the pine trees On the reservation. That one is Mother And that one over There is Mother And so is that third Pine in the valley And that tall one On the ridge is Mother. Okay, I’m either lazy Or I have an arboreal strain Of Oedipus complex. So let me take this down A few degrees. That pine, the closest one To my mother’s grave— I imagine its roots Will eventually feed On what my mother Will become After many years In the earth. So let my mother Be that tree And let that one tree Be my mother. And let my Mother Tree Turn every toxin Into oxygen So that my siblings And I can finally And simply breathe.

But I saw something only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things. Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who's perished from famine, from war, from the plague... And they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling, spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles and formed a web, a great net of souls. And the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Because nothing is lost forever. In this world, there a kind of painful progress. A longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.

Water…the strangest chemical, the great mystery. With two hydrogen atoms at the tips, each bonded to a single oxygen at the center, it is a bent molecule, not linear. If it were linear, there would be no life on earth…no stories to tell.

hurricane of images in my head. Neon’s eyes are dancing. He’s not trying to do this. It’s his mind, racing, losing oxygen—he can’t control it. These aren’t visions. These are memories. My memories! There are two of them, crystal clear. . . .

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth’s atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas’s volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct.

Jin sipped his coffee and made a face. I’ve seen it before. Earthers hate our coffee. Physics dictates that it tastes like shit. Earth’s air is 20 percent oxygen. The rest is stuff human bodies don’t need like nitrogen and argon. So Artemis’s air is pure oxygen at 20 percent Earth’s air pressure. That gives us the right amount of oxygen while minimizing pressure on the hulls. It’s not a new concept—it goes back to the Apollo days. Thing is, the lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point of water.

stromatolites—a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.

A multitude of harlequin lifeforms bobbed and twirled and played in the depths of the Atlantic. Pink cucumbers with thorny backs. Algae. Starfish. Annelids with simple brains and a hundred toes. Sponges—like yellow, swollen hands—sucked in water and pushed out oxygen. Most amusing were the mysterious buggers who had no likeness on the previous earth; tiny beasts with exotic exoskeletons engraved with deep grid-like patterns, snails with horns, and slithering plants that looked like magenta weeping willows.

Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it. But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.

Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone

If men were to colonize the moon or Mars—even with abundant supplies of oxygen, water, and food, as well as adequate protection against heat, cold, and radiation—they would not long retain their humanness, because they would be deprived of those stimuli which only Earth can provide. Similarly, we shall progressively lose our humanness even on Earth if we continue to pour filth into the atmosphere; to befoul soil, lakes, and rivers; to disfigure landscapes with junkpiles; to destroy wild plants and animals that do not contribute to monetary values; and thus transform the globe into an environment alien to our evolutionary past. The quality of human life is inextricably interwoven with the kinds and variety of stimuli man receives from the Earth and the life it harbors, because human nature is shaped biologically and mentally by external nature. (Rene Dubos qtd. in Kaltreider)

...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.

Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world—we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us.

Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on. A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stays in the air, and contain less oxygen, which is doom for phytoplankton—which does for the ocean what plants do on land, eating carbon and producing oxygen—which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more.

When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits all sorts of molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules) on its way to Earth and bounces off them like a pinball. This is called scattering, which means that on a clear day, if you look at any part of the sky, the light you see has been bouncing around the atmosphere before coming into your eye. If all light was scattered equally, the sky would look white. But it doesn’t. The reason is that the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we see a blue one.

Plants are our food, oxygen, and medicine. Some even say they are one of the most pleasurable experiences on earth! From the flowers to the trees and the seas filled with coral dreams; the earth’s natural flora has inspired and enhanced humans for as long as time can tell. That’s why the power of plants is the key to unlocking our enjoyment of life.

Silence. Then, “What does. This. Sound like?” “What does what sound like?” “Io is a sulfur-rich, iron-cored moon in a circular orbit around Jupiter. What does this. Sound like? Tidal forces from Jupiter and Ganymede pull and squeeze Io sufficiently to melt Tartarus, its sub-surface sulfur ocean. Tartarus vents its excess energy with sulfur and sulfur dioxide volcanoes. What does. This sound like? Io’s metallic core generates a magnetic field that punches a hole in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, and also creates a high-energy ion flux tube connecting its own poles with the north and south poles of Jupiter. What. Does this sound like? Io sweeps up and absorbs all the electrons in the million-volt range. Its volcanoes pump out sulfur dioxide; its magnetic field breaks down a percentage of that into sulfur and oxygen ions; and these ions are pumped into the hole punched in the magnetosphere, creating a rotating field commonly called the Io torus. What does this sound like? Torus. Flux tube. Magnetosphere. Volcanoes. Sulfur ions. Molten ocean. Tidal heating. Circular orbit. What does this sound like?” Against her will, Martha had found herself first listening, then intrigued, and finally involved. It was like a riddle or a word-puzzle. There was a right answer to the question. Burton or Hols would have gotten it immediately. Martha had to think it through. There was the faint hum of the radio’s carrier beam. A patient, waiting noise. At last, she cautiously said, “It sounds like a machine.

And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

Don’t most scientists agree that liquid water is necessary for life to evolve?” “They’re wrong!” I crossed my arms. “There’s nothing magical about hydrogen and oxygen! They’re required for Earth life, sure. But another planet could have completely different conditions. All life needs is a chemical reaction that results in copies of the original catalyst. And you don’t need water for that!

All my life I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be like? Of what would it be made? All living things on our planet are constructed of organic molecules—complex microscopic architectures in which the carbon atom plays a central role. There was once a time before life, when the Earth was barren and utterly desolate. Our world is now overflowing with life. How did it come about? How, in the absence of life, were carbon-based organic molecules made? How did the first living things arise? How did life evolve to produce beings as elaborate and complex as we, able to explore the mystery of our own origins? And on the countless other planets that may circle other suns, is there life also? Is extraterrestrial life, if it exists, based on the same organic molecules as life on Earth? Do the beings of other worlds look much like life on Earth? Or are they stunningly different—other adaptations to other environments? What else is possible? The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. In the great dark between the stars there are clouds of gas and dust and organic matter. Dozens of different kinds of organic molecules have been found there by radio telescopes. The abundance of these molecules suggests that the stuff of life is everywhere. Perhaps the origin and evolution of life is, given enough time, a cosmic inevitability. On some of the billions of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, life may never arise. On others, it may arise and die out, or never evolve beyond its simplest forms. And on some small fraction of worlds there may develop intelligences and civilizations more advanced than our own. Occasionally someone remarks on what a lucky coincidence it is that the Earth is perfectly suitable for life—moderate temperatures, liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, and so on. But this is, at least in part, a confusion of cause and effect. We earthlings are supremely well adapted to the environment of the Earth because we grew up here. Those earlier forms of life that were not well adapted died. We are descended from the organisms that did well. Organisms that evolve on a quite different world will doubtless sing its praises too. All life on Earth is closely related. We have a common organic chemistry and a common evolutionary heritage. As a result, our biologists are profoundly limited. They study only a single kind of biology, one lonely theme in the music of life. Is this faint and reedy tune the only voice for thousands of light-years? Or is there a kind of cosmic fugue, with themes and counterpoints, dissonances and harmonies, a billion different voices playing the life music of the Galaxy? Let

So that’s the situation. I’m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last thirty-one days. If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.

As she lies in the bed she weeps, for Bing, for the melting, shimmering candles, the filigree on the holiday tablecloth. She is an unwilling astronaut, bumping against the thick glass of the ship, her line tangling lazily in zero gravity, face mask fogged with fear. My sister reaches across, over the bed, and we both embrace the mother, holding her on earth, pulling her onto the ship, breathing our oxygen into her line. Ten hours later she is dead.

Richard Lewontin observes . . . In Cladocera, small fresh-water arthropods, reproduction remains asexual as long as conditions of temperature, oxygen dissolved in the water, food availability, and degree of crowding remain constant. Then, if a sudden change in these conditions occurs . . . the Cladocera switch to sexual reproduction. . . . The organisms are detecting a rate of change of an input, not its absolute value. They are performing mathematical differentiation.22

Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

Plants made me, after all. Every bundle of muscle in my body was woven from the sugars plants spun from moisture and air. My blood cells that course through my veins like water through rootlets are each kept ruby red with the oxygen plants made. The branching structure of my lungs are suffused with that too. Every inward breath of mine was first breathed out by plants. In this material sense, in terms of what they’ve contributed to my physical being, they are as much my relatives as any family member I know.

Did you know,” North said, as he hung a feathery blue jay, “that real trees are better for the environment than fake ones? A lot of people think the fake ones are better, because you have to throw out the real ones every year, but real trees produce oxygen and provide wildlife habitats while they grow, and then, when they’re done, they can be ground into mulch to fertilize the earth. While the plastic ones just… rot in landfills. They can take hundreds of years to decompose.” Marigold waited until he was done with his rant. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.

God saw Hansen tighten his chokehold on Day and he could see his lover fighting to breathe. Day’s ears and neck were bright red. His lips were turning a darker color as his body was deprived of oxygen. Hansen pressed the barrel in deeper and yelled. “Two minutes and fifteen seconds before I get to zero and I provide the great state of Georgia the luxury of one less narc.” God’s mind exploded at the thought of not having Day in a world he lived in. He looked into his partner’s glistening eyes and saw he was turning blue and possibly getting ready to faint. Day was still looking at him, looking into God’s green eyes. No, no, no! He’s saying good-bye. God closed his eyes and released a loud, gut-wrenching growl cutting off the SWAT leader’s negotiations. “Godfrey, get yourself under control,” his captain said while grabbing for him. God jerked himself away from the hold and stepped forward, his angry eyes boring into Hansen’s dark ones. Hansen stared at him as if God was crazy. Little did he know God was at that moment. “Godfrey, get back here and stand down. That’s an order, Detective!” his captain barked. God’s large hands clenched at his sides fighting not to pull out his weapons. He ground his teeth together so hard his jaw ached. “Do you have any idea of the shit storm you’re about to bring down on your life,” God spoke with a menacing snarl while his large frame shook with fury. “In your arms you hold the only thing in this world that means anything to me. The man that you are pointing a gun at is my only purpose for living. You are threating to kill the only person in this world that gives a fuck about me.” God took two more steps forward and was vaguely aware of the complete silence surrounding him. Hansen’s finger hovered shakily over the trigger as he took two large steps back with Day still tight against his chest. God growled again and he saw a shade of fear ghost over Hansen’s sweaty face. “If you kill that man, I swear on everything that is holy, I will track you to the ends of the earth, killing and destroying any and everything you hold dear. I will take everything from you and leave you alive to suffer through it. I will bestow upon you the same misery that you have given to me.” Hansen shook his head and inched closer to the door behind him. “Stay back,” he yelled again but this time the demand lacked the courage and venom he exhibited before. “You kill that man, and you’ll have no idea of the monster you will create. Have you ever met a man with no heart…no conscience…no soul…no purpose?” God rumbled, his voice at least twelve octaves lower than the already deep baritone. God yanked his Desert Eagle from his holster in a flash and cocked the hammer back chambering the first round. Hansen stumbled back again, his eyes gone wide with fear. God’s entire body instinctually flexed every muscle in his body and it felt like the large vein in his neck might rupture. His body burned like he had a sweltering fever and he knew his wrath had him a brilliant shade of red. “I’m asking you a goddamn question, Hansen! No soul! No conscience! I’m asking you have you ever met the devil!” God’s thunderous voice practically rattled the glass in the hanger. “If you kill the man I love, you better make your peace with God, because I’m gonna meet your soul in hell.” His voice boomed.

By one billion years ago, plants, working cooperatively, had made a stunning change in the environment of the Earth. Green plants generate molecular oxygen. Since the oceans were by now filled with simple green plants, oxygen was becoming a major constituent of the Earth’s atmosphere, altering it irreversibly from its original hydrogen-rich character and ending the epoch of Earth history when the stuff of life was made by nonbiological processes. But oxygen tends to make organic molecules fall to pieces. Despite our fondness for it, it is fundamentally a poison for unprotected organic matter. The transition to an oxidizing atmosphere posed a supreme crisis in the history of life, and a great many organisms, unable to cope with oxygen, perished. A few primitive forms, such as the botulism and tetanus bacilli, manage to survive even today only in oxygen-free environments. The nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere is much more chemically inert and therefore much more benign than oxygen. But it, too, is biologically sustained. Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

SOMETIMES LAURENCE ZONED out and imagined walking on another Earth-like planet. The weird gravity. The different mix of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in the air. Types of life that might defy our definitions of “plant” or “animal.” More than one moon, maybe more than one sun. His heart could burst, just with the newness of it: digging bare feet into soil that no human toes had ploughed, under a brazen sky that proclaimed all the things we had thought our limits were merely our prejudices. And then he snapped back, to the reality that his team was stuck: no closer to opening up the final frontier than a year earlier.

Suppose two astronauts go to the moon. When they arrive, they have an accident and find out that they have only enough oxygen for two days. There is no hope of someone coming from Earth in time to rescue them. They have only two days to live. If you asked them at that moment, "What is your deepest wish?" they would answer, "To be back home walking on the beautiful planet Earth." That would be enough for them; they would not want anything else. They would not want to be the head of a large corporation, a big celebrity or president of the United States. They would not want anything except to be back on Earth - to be walking on Earth, enjoying every step, listening to the sounds of nature and holding the hand of their beloved while contemplating the moon. We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from the moon. We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious beautiful planet. The Zen master Lin Chi said, "The miracle is not to walk on water but to walk on the Earth." I cherish that teaching. I enjoy just walking, even in busy places like airports and railway stations. In walking like that, with each step caressing our Mother Earth, we can inspire other people to do the same. We can enjoy every minute of our lives.

Diversity is necessary to healthy transformative survival: and diversity is also one of the underlying sources of social conflict on this hair-trigger nuclear stockpile we call Earth. It should be seen universally that the loss of cultural diversity is as threatening as the loss of genetic diversity to the maintenance and salvation of humanity on Earth and in space. Diversity allows the kinds of specialization and interdependence characteristic of a complex and highly evolved culture. Delight in difference will thus become necessary, like oxygen, if humanity is to survive. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations is a key to survival.

In an extremely short period of geologic time the Earth has been saturated with several billion pounds of nonbiodegradable, often biologically unique pharmaceuticals designed to kill bacteria. Many antibiotics (literally meaning “against life”) do not discriminate in their activity, but kill broad groups of diverse bacteria whenever they are used. The worldwide environmental dumping, over the past 65 years, of such huge quantities of synthetic antibiotics has initiated the most pervasive impacts on the Earth’s bacterial underpinnings since oxygen-generating bacteria supplanted methanogens 2.5 billion years ago. As bacterial researcher Stuart Levy comments . . . It has stimulated evolutionary changes that are unparalleled in recorded biologic history.4

By overexploiting the Earth’s natural resources, humanity is not putting nature at risk, but nature’s provisional capacity to nourish humanity. Humanity is putting itself at risk. It is highly unlikely that in 2050 nine billion people can live in a civilisation of economic development and growth as we do today. No massive technological progress can be seen on the horizon that will lower the burden of the energy, farming and fishing levies on the capital of the Earth. The ecosystem in itself is in no way threatened. The Earth still has 4 billion years before it can regenerate all its resources — without mankind! — thanks to the chemistry of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. A ravaged ecosystem will regenerate itself very rapidly, that is, in less than 100,000 years.

Soon, said the artists, ignoring him, there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed. People would creep along through this tubing, single file, stark naked, their only view the asshole of the one before them in the line, their urine and excrement flowing down through vents in the floor, until they were randomly selected by a digitalized mechanism, at which point they would be sucked into a side tunnel, ground up, and fed to the others through a series of nipple-shaped appendages on the inside of the tube. The system would be self-sustaining and perpetual, and would serve everybody right.

absolute scientific proof, but in the everyday sense of “evidence so strong you would bet your savings on it.” In that sense, we can surely prove that there’s no God. This is the same sense, by the way, in which we can “prove” that the earth rotates on its axis, that a normal water molecule has one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, and that we evolved from other creatures very different from modern humans. With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of “proof” in hand, we can disprove a god’s existence in this way: If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. In other words, the absence of evidence—if evidence should be there—is indeed evidence of absence.

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

Had your spacecraft flown by the Earth a hundred million years ago, in the age of the dinosaurs when there were no humans and no technology, you would still have seen oxygen and ozone, the chlorophyll pigment, and far too much methane. At present, though, your instruments are finding signs not just of life, but of high technology—something that couldn’t possibly have been detected even a hundred years ago: You are detecting a particular kind of radio wave emanating from Earth. Radio waves don’t necessarily signify life and intelligence. Many natural processes generate them. You’ve already found radio emissions from other, apparently uninhabited worlds—generated by electrons trapped in the strong magnetic fields of planets, by chaotic motions at the shock front that separates these magnetic fields from the interplanetary magnetic field, and by lightning.

From one perspective, the biosphere can be understood as a complex three-dimensional biofilm that extends from deep in the Earth to the edges of space. That Gaian biofilm continually regulates the environment of the Earth; it is, for instance, what keeps the oxygen content of the atmosphere at 21 percent. Oxygen, a highly reactive gas, will, when left to its own devices, combine with other elements to achieve a stable state, but on this planet, it does not. It was that insight that began James Lovelock’s understanding that the Earth is a self-organized system regulating its own environment. In spite of reductionists’ discomfort, such regulation has been found to occur anytime a living, self- organized system emerges. As Williams and Lenton comment about such systems, “the environment is consistently regulated to habitable conditions, even in the face of severe external perturbations.

Let’s say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere—under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we,” Malcolm said, “think it wouldn’t.” Hammond said, “Well, if the ozone layer gets thinner—” “There will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. So what?” “Well. It’ll cause skin cancer.” Malcolm shook his head. “Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.” “And many others will die out,” Hammond said. Malcolm sighed. “You think this is the first time such a thing has happened? Don’t you know about oxygen?” “I know it’s necessary for life.” “It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells—say, around three billion years ago—it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly—five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!

Icelandic Language In this language, no industrial revolution; no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone; only sheep, fish, horses, water falling. The middle class can hardly speak it. In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble through dark and rain with a handful of rags. The door groans; the old smell comes up from under the earth to meet you. But this language believes in ghosts; chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses neigh inside an empty gully, nothing at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks. The woman with marble hands whispers this language to you in your sleep; faces come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes. In this language, you can't chit-chat holding a highball in your hand, can't even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course, all your grief and failure come clear at last. Old inflections move from case to case, gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening vowels, till they sound like the sea moving icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

Now air consists principally of twenty-one parts of oxygen and seventy-nine of nitrogen. The lungs absorb the oxygen, which is indispensable for the support of life, and reject the nitrogen. The air expired loses nearly five per cent. of the former and contains nearly an equal volume of carbonic acid, produced by the combustion of the elements of the blood. In an air-tight enclosure, then, after a certain time, all the oxygen of the air will be replaced by the carbonic acid— a gas fatal to life. There were two things to be done then— first, to replace the absorbed oxygen; secondly, to destroy the expired carbonic acid; both easy enough to do, by means of chlorate of potassium and caustic potash. The former is a salt which appears under the form of white crystals; when raised to a temperature of 400 degrees it is transformed into chlorure of potassium, and the oxygen which it contains is entirely liberated. Now twenty-eight pounds of chlorate of potassium produces seven pounds of oxygen, or 2,400 liters— the quantity necessary for the travelers during twenty-four hours.

In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive. He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe? Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides

The gorgonians tend to grow in closely packed, branching masses, but they do not fuse to each other; if they did, their morphogenesis would doubtless become a shambles. Theodor, in a series of elegant experiments, has shown that when two individuals of the same species are placed in close contact, the smaller of the two will always begin to disintegrate. It is autodestruction due to lytic mechanisms entirely under the governance of the smaller partner. He is not thrown out, not outgamed, not outgunned; he simply chooses to bow out. It is not necessarily a comfort to know that such things go on in biology, but it is at least an agreeable surprise. The oxygen in the atmosphere is the exhalation of the chloroplasts living in plants (also, for our amazement, in the siphons of giant clams and lesser marine animals). It is a natural tendency for genetically unrelated cells in tissue culture to come together, ignoring species differences, and fuse to form hybrid cells. Inflammation and immunology must indeed be powerfully designed to keep us apart; without such mechanisms, involving considerable effort, we might have developed as a kind of flowing syncytium over the earth, without the morphogenesis of even a flower.

It appears that during the early years of the solar system Venus was only slightly warmer than Earth and probably had oceans. But those few degrees of extra warmth meant that Venus could not hold on to its surface water, with disastrous consequences for its climate. As its water evaporated, the hydrogen atoms escaped into space, and the oxygen atoms combined with carbon to form a dense atmosphere of the greenhouse gas CO2. Venus became stifling. Although people of my age will recall a time when astronomers hoped that Venus might harbor life beneath its padded clouds, possibly even a kind of tropical verdure, we now know that it is much too fierce an environment for any kind of life that we can reasonably conceive of. Its surface temperature is a roasting 470 degrees centigrade (roughly 900 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure at the surface is ninety times that of Earth, or more than any human body could withstand. We lack the technology to make suits or even spaceships that would allow us to visit. Our knowledge of Venus’s surface is based on distant radar imagery and some startled squawks from an unmanned Soviet probe that was dropped hopefully into the clouds in 1972 and functioned for barely an hour before permanently shutting down.

Of all the metals there is none more essential to life than iron. It is the accumulation of iron in the center of a star which triggers a supernova explosion and the subsequent scattering of the vital atoms of life throughout the cosmos. It was the drawing by gravity of iron atoms to the center of the primeval earth that generated the heat which caused the initial chemical differentiation of the earth, the outgassing of the early atmosphere, and ultimately the formation of the hydrosphere. It is molten iron in the center of the earth which, acting like a gigantic dynamo, generates the earth's magnetic field, which in turn creates the Van Allen radiation belts that shield the earth's surface from destructive high-energypenetrating cosmic radiation and preserve the crucial ozone layer from cosmic ray destruction… Without the iron atom, there would be no carbon-based life in the cosmos; no supernovae, no heating of the primitive earth, no atmosphere or hydrosphere. There would be no protective magnetic field, no Van Allen radiation belts, no ozone layer, no metal to make hemoglobin [in human blood], no metal to tame the reactivity of oxygen, and no oxidative metabolism. The intriguing and intimate relationship between life and iron, between the red color of blood and the dying of some distant star, not only indicates the relevance of metals to biology but also the biocentricity of the cosmos… This account clearly indicates the importance of the iron atom. The fact that particular attention is drawn to iron in the Qur'an also emphasises the importance of the element.

Look. It's the condition our condition is in. Everybody wants the life of a black man. White men want us dead or quiet - which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing. They want us, you know, 'universal,' human, no 'race consciousness.' Tame, except in bed. They like a little racial loincloth in the bed. But outside the bed they want us to be individuals. You tell them, 'But they lynched my papa,' and they say, 'Yeah, but you're better than the lynchers are, so forget it.' And black women, they want your whole self. Love, they call it, and understanding. 'Why don't you understand me?' What they mean is, Don't love anything on earth except me. They say, 'Be responsible,' but what they mean is, Don't go anywhere where I ain't. You try to climb Mount Everest, they'll tie up your ropes. Tell them you want to go to the bottom of the sea - just for a look - they'll hide your oxygen tank. Or you don't even have to go that far. Buy a horn and say you want to play. Oh, they love the music, but only after you pull eight at the post office. Even if you make it, even if you stubborn and mean and you get to the top of Mount Everest, or you do play and you good, real good - that still ain't enough. You blow your lungs out on the horn and they want what breath you got left to hear about how you love them. They want your full attention. Take a risk and they say you not for real. That you don't love them. They won't even let you risk your own life, man, your own life - unless it's over them. You can't even die unless it's about them. What good is a man's life if he can't even choose what to die for?

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

God. God has no religion. God does not care if you're rich or poor, if you're black, white, Hispanic, Arabic or Asian. God does not care if you go to the temple on a full moon day or if you missed your weekly Sunday church mass. God does not care if you walk around in a bikini or Hijab. God is not moved by the man or woman who takes a moment off every day to be religious or fasts in his name for weeks at a time. God dwells within a being's mind, body and soul. God cares about their intentions. God is indeed almighty; he is a maestro of logic and a brilliant multi-tasker who dwells within billions of minds at a time. But that is only the big picture. So is there a smaller picture? Why yes, there is. But, it’s not so simple. In fact it may be the most denied fact in human life. You see, we humans are of dependent nature. We depend on the earth's soil and animals for food, we depend on its water, light and oxygen. We are a civilization of dependents. Someone once said that our biggest fear is not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure. That is indeed true. We refuse to believe that God lives within us. We refuse to believe that our intelligence is God himself. We refuse to believe that we have all the power in the world within ourselves. We refuse to believe that we are stronger than our fears, larger than our limits and more than just a name. We would rather praise our successes and blame our ill fates to an external God. We refuse to take responsibility for our fate or what we do with it. We'd rather have someone to blame it all on. Maybe the thought of having so much power within ourselves scares us. Maybe we are too irresponsible to have such authority over our own lives. Maybe we are cowards. So we look for God in an outer space that we can't reach.

So it’s not the sight of stromatolites that makes them exciting. It’s the idea of them – and in this respect they are peerless. Well, imagine it. You are looking at living rocks – quietly functioning replicas of the very first organic structures ever to appear on earth. You are experiencing the world as it was 3.5 billion years ago – more than three-quarters of the way back to the moment of terrestrial creation. Now if that is not an exciting thought, I don’t know what is. As the aforementioned palaeontologist Richard Fortey has put it: ‘This is truly time travelling, and if the world were attuned to its real wonders this sight would be as well-known as the pyramids of Giza.’ Quite right. Stromatolites are rather like corals in that all of their life is on the surface, and that most of what you are looking at is the dead mass of earlier generations. If you peer, you can sometimes see tiny bubbles of oxygen rising in streams from the formations. This is the stromatolite’s only trick and it isn’t much, but it is what made life as we know it possible. The bubbles are produced by primitive algae-like micro-organisms called cyanobacteria, which live on the surface of the rocks – about three billion of them to the square yard, to save you counting – each of them capturing a molecule of carbon dioxide and a tiny beat of energy from the sun and combining them to fuel its unimaginably modest ambitions to exist, to live. The byproduct of this very simple process is the faintest puff of oxygen. But get enough stromatolites respiring away over a long enough period and you can change the world. For two billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 per cent – enough to allow the development of other, more complex life forms: me, for instance. My gratitude was real. The

Ночной перелет в Сан-Франциско. Погоня за луной через всю Америку. Господи, уже сто лет не летала на самолетах. Поднявшись на 35 тысяч футов, мы достигли тропопаузы, огромного пояса безветрия. Ближе к озоновому слою я еще никогда не была. Вот бы оказаться там, вот бы самолет поднялся выше тропопаузы и достиг внешнего слоя - озона изношенного, рваного, продырявленного, как кусок сыра, и от того страшного. Но я бы видела больше остальных, благодаря своей способности замечать такие вещи. Я бы видела души, поднимающиеся с поверхности земли. Души людей, которые спаслись от голода, войн, чумы. Они взлетают как прыгуны с трамплина, только наоборот, с широко раскинутыми руками, кружась вокруг своей оси. И достигнув высшей точки, они берут друг друга за руки, формируя огромную необъятную сеть душ. Именно души состоят из трех атомных молекул кислорода, которые и латают износившийся озоновый слой . Ничто не пропадает навсегда. Даже в нашем мире есть пускай и мучительный, но все же прогресс. Он оставляет все былое позади, а мечтания - впереди. По крайней мере, я в это верю. "Ангелы в Америке" Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

My little undomesticated pornstar pushed me so hard between her legs, my oxygen levels plummeted. She clenched around my fingers through her panties as an orgasm rolled through her in waves. The gush of warmth soaked the cotton. I kissed her through the fabric, again and again, knowing tomorrow everything would return to its proper position—my boundaries, my limits, my hang-ups, my demons. “Can I return the favor?” Dallas sat half up. “But not through your briefs. Men’s briefs always smell like old cheese that’s been sitting in a crockpot for days. I know because whenever my housekeeper went on vacation, we all took turns doing the laundry. And, well, I really shouldn’t say, but Dadd—” Not wanting the moment to be ruined with a conversation about her father’s underwear, I pulled forward, shutting her smart mouth with a kiss that tasted like her sweet pussy. At first, she pinched her lips and made a face, unsure what she thought about her own taste. But when I dragged the tip of my hard cock along her slit through our clothes, she went wild and kissed me back, shoving her tongue so deep down my throat I thought she would fish out my dinner. “Yes.” She wiggled against me. “Please, sir, may I have some more?” She’d quoted Oliver Twist while getting fucked. Truly, the woman was one of a kind. Knowing it was idiotic, and dangerous, and deranged, I pushed my tip through her slit. She was tight—tighter, still, through the tattered, stretched cotton of her ruined panties—but wet and sleek, ready for what was coming. The sensation, how warm and taut she felt, completely undid me. I thrust harder and deeper, entering her through our underwear, fucking her slowly with only flimsy fabric between us. I tore my mouth from hers, eyes glued to my cock each time it sank into her. I could barely fit inside, she was so tight. This was, by far, the best fuck I’d ever had. She panted. “Is this what people call dry-humping?” No. Nothing about this was dry. I was basically fucking her through our underwear. Only, explaining to her that this was full-blown sex with a side order of my issues was not in my plans for tonight. Or ever. “Sure.” Each push brought me closer to a climax. From slow, controlled, teasing thrusts designed to drive her mad with desire, I quickly derailed to jerky, manic, need-to-be-inside-this-woman plunges. Of a man so hungry for human connection, for affection, for carnal needs to be met and satisfied. My head grew dizzy. I’d taken into consideration the possibility that Dallas couldn’t come through penetration. It merely placed her in the same majority as most females on Planet Earth. But she shook, clawed, and reached for me, looking ready to climax. Her tits bounced and jiggled each time I slammed into her. Her mouth opened in awe, probably because this orgasm felt different from the first two. Deeper and more violent. She clutched the lapels of my shirt, shoving her face in mine. “Lose the underwear.” She met my thrust, groaning when my crown peeked past the slot in my boxer briefs. “I want you to come inside me. I want to feel you.” I was about two seconds from fulfilling her demand. Luckily, my logic grabbed the steering wheel, which my cock had seized sometime this evening, and derailed the situation from full-blown calamity. I managed to wait until she came, just barely, before pulling out, flipping her onto her stomach, and jerking off. I aimed for her bare ass but somehow came on her hair. No matter. She had plenty of time to wash it. Her agenda wasn’t exactly full. Dallas fell back onto the pillows, a lopsided grin on her face. (Chapter 31)

Today we experience oxygen in the most intimate exchange. With every breath we take, a tiny portion of the air becomes a part of us, even as a tiny part of us becomes the air. As days pass, our bodies melt away and form again in moment-by-moment chemical reactions with oxygen. Our tissues are replaced over and over again throughout our lives, Earth’s finite store of atoms recycling among air, sea, land, and all its living forms. Most of the atoms that formed your infant body at birth are now dispersed, as your present atoms will be again, if you have the good fortune to live a few more years on this oxygen-rich planetary home.

Air is the clear gas that surrounds the Earth. It is a mix of many other gases, dust particles, and water molecules. Most of air is nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), and other trace gases, including carbon dioxide and helium, which make up less than a tenth of 1%. We call the air around Earth the atmosphere. Gravity pulls the atmosphere toward the center of the Earth. (That’s why it doesn’t just fly off into space.) Atmospheric pressure is the force of the air pushing against objects. Atmospheric pressure is highest at the Earth’s surface because gravity is pulling all the air above it toward the center of the planet. (That’s a lot of air!) There is less and less air as you travel from the planet’s surface toward space. So there is less pressure! It’s like being in an ocean. When you float near the top of the ocean, there is only a small amount of water pushing down on you. When you swim at the bottom of the ocean, all the weight of the water between you and the ocean’s surface is pushing down on you. That is much heavier!

From Alice Walker: I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them as least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. “Magic,” intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life-itself- will no longer be able to breathe in us. One day it occurred to me that if all the birds died, as they might well do, eventually, from the poisonings of their air, water, and food, it would be next to impossible to describe to our children the wonder of their flight. But what I am also sharing with you is this thought- the Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. I realize now that I did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world do our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come where it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth…Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and you shall receive. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me- and to yourself. For we are one. “God” answers prayers. Which is another way of saying, “the Universe responds.” We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace. Pass it on.

And you'll be able to tell whether or not this is an opal?" "According to the baron's instructions, it should have a transparent or white body tone, then we must look at the background color, a slight tinge of color, like a spark of fire." Stefan gave a satisfied grunt and held it up to the light. "It has a wonderful luster and a play of color." Della peered over his shoulder. "Where do they come from? How are they made?" "Mother Nature at her best. Unique conditions first. Heavy seasonal rains in parched desert regions where the ground is rich in silica." "What's sillyka?" "A colorless chemical compound, one of the most common elements on earth after oxygen." "Then what makes this so special? You'd think we trip over them all over the place. I ain't never seen one." "Because the conditions must be just right. Rainwater trickles down into the earth and carries silica-rich solutions into the cavities between the rocks. Then hot summers dry the earth, and as the water evaporates the silica stays in place, and over millions of years the opals form. The purity, intensity, and brilliance of color increases the deeper the rock is penetrated." "Before it just looked like a dirty white pebble." "You're right. The actual color is a pearl gray; sometimes you see a little pale-red or yellow tint, but with reflected light it presents all the colors of the rainbow.

Environments without oxygen are excellent for the preservation of soft parts: no oxidation, no decay by aerobic bacteria. Such conditions are common on earth, particularly in stagnant basins. But the very conditions that promote preservation also decree that few organisms, if any, make their natural home in such places.

The only thing in this God's green earth that's equivalent to taking in Oxygen and taking out Carbon dioxide is being smart because without it one might as well be considered to be a walking dead man.

They say the Amazon is the lungs of our planet, and it is true that nearly 20 percent of the oxygen on earth is produced there. Yet in the Amazon most of the oxygen that the jungle produces is absorbed back up each night through respiration. Inhaling and exhaling, the basin is almost entirely a closed system of self-sustaining processes. It is in fact the fallen leaves that lead to the creation of oxygen in a magnificently large process.

Besides carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, these useful abundant elements include silicon and aluminum, both common in the Earth’s crust.

It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself. There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear. I have inhabited each and know one to feel deceptively like the other.

This leaf is life,” he says very seriously. “It is the one and only link between the earth and the sun; every second it is taking light and creating the nutrients our bodies need to survive. It takes toxins from the air to give us clean oxygen to breathe. It supplies us with medicine to heal our bodies. Even when humans numbered in the tens of billions, this leaf—our plant life—made up over ninety-nine percent of the earth’s living creatures. All of life depends on them. They were here long before us and they will be here long after we’re gone.

In what is considered to be one of the toughest foot races on earth, competitors run the equivalent of six regular marathons over six days in the Sahara Desert, during which they are required to carry their own food. Blood samples were taken from runners 72 hours after completion of the race, with researchers noting a “significant alteration of the blood antioxidant defense capacity” and concluding that “such extreme competition induced an imbalance between oxidant and antioxidant protection.

In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.

The 8% level is the minimum required for the existence of large-bodied animals that lack digestive tracts and internal organs (the Avalon animals, e.g. sponges and jellyfish). The 10% level is the minimum required for animals with complex internal organs (the Cambrian animals). One of the great marvels of life history is that the Avalon and Cambrian animals representing several Avalon phyla and 30+ Cambrian phyla appeared in what may be considered a geologic 'instant' after each of the oxygen levels was attained.

Like the Great Oxidation Event, the Great Unconformity injected an enormous quantity of oxygen into the atmosphere through a massive and efficient subduction of organic carbon into Earth's mantle. When this event occurred, the oxygen quantity in Earth's atmosphere jumped from 1% or less up to 8%. Just before the time of the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago, another major continental erosion event coupled with oceanic sediment subduction led to a jump in the atmosphere oxygen level from 8 to 10%.

Oxygen comprises 21% of the Earth’s atmosphere. If oxygen were 25%, fires would erupt spontaneously. If it were 15%, human beings would suffocate.17 •​If the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere were higher than it is now, a runaway greenhouse effect would develop. We would all burn up. If the level were lower, plants would not be able to maintain efficient photosynthesis. We would all suffocate.18 •​If the centrifugal force of planetary movements did not precisely match the gravitational forces, nothing could be held in orbit around the sun.19 •​If Jupiter were not in its current orbit, the Earth would be bombarded with space material. Jupiter’s gravitational field acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner attracting asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike the Earth.20 •​If the rotation of the Earth took longer than 24 hours, temperature differences would be too great between night and day. If the period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocities would be too great.21 •​If the twenty-three-degree axis tilt of the Earth were altered slightly, surface temperatures would be too extreme.22 •​If the moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth were much greater, tidal effects on the oceans, atmosphere, and the Earth’s rotational period would be too severe for life. If it were less, orbital changes would cause climatic instabilities which would prohibit life.23

So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly two degrees Fahrenheit, which in a masterpiece of understatement the New York Times once described as “a large number for the surface of an entire planet.”9 This is humanity’s largest accomplishment, and indeed the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days two billion years ago when cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet.

Every day on Earth, our souls carry around a physical body whose cells are constantly growing, dying, and changing. Without these bodies, our souls couldn’t spend valuable time on the physical dimension learning and evolving. A scuba diver needs the warmth of a wet suit, a tank of oxygen, a compass, and a clock to wander the depths of the ocean. So, too, do our souls need the body to accomplish our tasks on Earth. And just as the diver’s oxygen tank eventually empties, our bodies ultimately stop functioning. The diver doesn’t spend his entire time underwater fretting about when his oxygen will run out. He knows that it will happen sooner or later, so he just enjoys marveling at the sights below the surface. He may be having a great time or just come upon an interesting shipwreck, but when the clock goes off, it’s time to go to the surface. There are no two ways about it. It certainly doesn’t mean that he can’t go back down again later. It’s just part of the experience. When the diver surfaces, he may slap on a new tank and dive back in, or he might lie on the boat and contemplate the journey he’s just completed. Throughout history, humans have looked upon death as something to fear. It’s fear of the unknown. It’s because God, in infinite wisdom, has awakened our awareness of reality while we’re in the depths of the ocean with a finite amount of oxygen, and we don’t know what will happen when the tank runs out. We don’t know that above the surface is the actual reality: our real “home.” We’ll dive with many friends, and when their tanks run out, they’ll have to go. We’ll miss them, of course, but when our time is up, we’ll see them topside. The last thing our friends would want is for us to spend the rest of our time mourning their absence. If we are to live with any measure of peace and die with any sense of acceptance, it is up to us to come to terms with how we view “death.

However it formed, this little cluster of manganese atoms opened up a new world, not only for the bacteria that first trapped it, but for all life on our planet. Once it formed, this little cluster of atoms started to split water, the four oxidised manganese atoms combining their natural avidity to yank electrons from water, thereby releasing oxygen as waste. Stimulated by the steady oxidation of manganese by ultraviolet radiation, the splitting of water would have been slow at first. But as soon as the cluster became coupled to chlorophyll, electrons would have started to flow. Getting faster as chlorophyll became adapted to its task, water was sucked in, split open, its electrons drawn out, oxygen discarded. Once a trickle, ultimately a flood, this life-giving flow of electrons from water is behind all the exuberance of life on earth. We must thank it twice–once for being the ultimate source of all our food, and then again for all the oxygen we need to burn up that food to stay alive.

We humans breathe an oxygen-rich atmosphere and respire aerobically all because cyanobacteria somehow came to possess two different photosystems from two different sources.

The most common of the gases making up the earth’s atmosphere are nitrogen (78 percent) and oxygen (21 percent). Combined, then, these two account for 99 percent of the dry atmosphere, and because of the peculiarities of molecular structure, heat passes through them easily. The largest part of the remaining 1 percent is the inert gas argon. But while even less abundant, some of the other gases—most significantly water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone—intercept, on average, about 83 percent of the heat emitted by the earth’s surface.8 So the earth does indeed emit energy equivalent to what it absorbs from the sun, but instead of directly flowing off into space, cooling our planet to a chilly average of 0ºF, much of that energy is intercepted by the atmosphere blanketing us.

When a planet is born from interstellar dust it has about twelve refractory minerals, those resistant to decomposition by heat, pressure, or chemical attack. By the time it is complete with asteroid accretion and finally volcanic activity, about 1,500 different minerals are present. The earth has at least 4,300 species of mineral. This high number is unique in the solar system, a function of biological processes such as photosynthesis that releases oxygen which chemically bonds with almost every element, creating new minerals.

I screamed as I dropped through the open air like a meteor, but it was a scream of exhilaration and not fear. The wind resisted, trying vainly to fight the unconquerable gravity, pushing against me, and twirling me in spirals like a rocket crashing to the earth. Yes! The word echoed through my head as I sliced through the surface of the water. It was icy, colder than I'd feared, and yet the chill only added to the high. I was proud of myself as I plunged deeper into the freezing black water. I hadn't had one moment of terror-just pure adrenaline. The fall wasn't scary at all. Where was the challenge? That was when the current caught me. I'd been so preoccupied with the size of the cliffs, by the obvious danger of their high, sheer faces, that I hadn't worried at all about the dark water waiting. I never dreamed that the true menace was lurking far below me, under the heaving surf. It felt like the waves were fighting over me, jerking me back and forth between them as if determined to share by pulling me into halves. I knew the right way to avoid a riptide: swim parallel to the beach rather than struggling for the shore. But the knowledge did me little good when I didn't know which way the shore was. I couldn't even tell which way the surface was. The angry water was black in every direction; there was no brightness to direct me upward. Gravity was all-powerful when it competed with the air, but it had nothing on the waves- I couldn't feel a downward pull, a sinking in any direction. Just the battering of the current that flung me round and round like a rag doll. I fought to keep my breath in, to keep my lips locked around my last store of oxygen.

No chemist would ask whether oxygen did well in uniting with hydrogen, or whether it is right in mixing with quicksilver. No astronomer would ask, whether the moon, in appearing between sun and earth is worthy of praise or blame-but no historian could be found who would consider it unjustified to judge about the "right" or "wrong" action of King X or Minister Y; who would refrain from praise or blame in the conception of any action whatever.

The explosion At first the crew thought a meteoroid had hit them. As well as the noise of an explosion, the electrics were going haywire and the attitude control thrusters had fired. In fact, a short circuit had ignited some insulation in the Number 2 oxygen tank of the Service Module. The Service Module provided life support, power and other systems to the Command Module, which held the astronauts as they travelled to and from lunar orbit. The Lunar Module was a separate, though connected, craft that would be used to ferry the men to the lunar surface and back. The fire caused a surge in pressure that ruptured the tank, flooding the fuel cell bay with gaseous oxygen. This surge blew the bolts holding on the outer panel, which tore off free and spun into space, damaging a communications antenna. Contact with Earth was lost for 1.8 seconds, until the system automatically switched to another antenna. The shock also ruptured a line from the Number 1 oxygen tank. Two hours later all of the Service Module’s oxygen supply had leaked into the void. As the Command Module’s fuel cells used oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity, it could now only run on battery power. The crew had no option but to shut down the Command Module completely and move into the Lunar Module. They would then use this as a ‘lifeboat’ for the journey back to Earth before rejoining the Command Module for re-entry. As for the mission, the Service Module was so badly damaged that a safe return from a lunar landing was impossible. These men would not be landing on the Moon. 320,000 km from home The Flight Director immediately aborted the mission. Now he just had to get the men home. The quickest way would be a Direct Abort trajectory, using the Service Module engine to essentially reverse the craft. But it was too late:

I am not a predictor It's not been long since I told some people, "I see no difference in value between any of the world's richest people and a poor child with a round-the-clock danger." Their disagreement / objection were all lying on wealth, advocates, friends, political influence, authorities, what they eat, and the place they settle, and all such worldly desires. But the testimony to my belief is three simple things: same oxygen, same sky, and same ignorance about planet's tomorrow's morning, which are our commonalities. Come on ... this is so raw, poetic, and spiritual view which works only for a literature / art book, not reality, they said. After several months of exposing to covid 19 and its unprecedented death tool everywhere beyond all the human being's differences, they got back to me with somehow regretfully letters saying " I would stand on your side, you're a predictor ". Here is the case: Our differences are embedded in a far much bigger circle, which is our commonalities. Our differences may be easy to be seen but what govern them are our similarities. Simply speaking, the first key helps you walk is not the skill how to walk, nor even how strong your feet are, but having a surface as earth underneath your feet. I am not a predictor then, only familiar with the forecast report of look.

In transporting the breath, the inhalation must be full. When it is full, it has big capacity. When it has big capacity, it can be extended. When it is extended, it can penetrate downward. When it penetrates downward, it will become calmly settled. When it is calmly settled, it will be strong and firm. When it is strong and firm, it will germinate. When it germinates, it will grow. When it grows, it will retreat upward. When it retreats upward, it will reach the top of the head. The secret power of Providence moves above. The secret power of the Earth moves below. He who follows this will live. He who acts against this will die.

According to biologist Lynn Margulis, it was this collaborative approach which allowed life to survive the first toxic pollutant holocaust—the spread in the atmosphere of a gas lethal to earth’s horde of early inhabitants. The killer gas was oxygen. But mitochondria living in the new eukaryotic cells saved the day, gulping oxygen before it could do its harm and turning the murderous vapor into food for their protectress and for the other members of her cellular commune.

In the womb, every child is interdependent with its mother’s body. If either of them is sick, the other is affected. In the same way we are interdependent with the body of the earth. The minerals of the soil make up our wheat and our bones, the storm clouds become our drinks and our blood, the oxygen from the trees and forests is the air we breathe. The more consciously we realize this shared destiny, the more compassion arises for the earth itself.

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear. I have inhabited each and know one to feel deceptively like the other. Until it is too late, and you are watching the eyes of the other inmates to see if there is death in them, watching every face you pass, listening to the angry hum for a hint you are its next target, clawing at the walls of your cell to get free, to get out, for air and sky and please, not this shrinking tomb. The fear world is worse than death. It is worse than anything.

the longest one percent of these fifteen thousand tributaries, alone, wind through more than sixty thousand miles of jungle. All in all, the Amazon River system contains more than twenty percent of the Earth’s fresh water, and the jungle generates more than twenty percent of the world’s oxygen. The Amazon River itself is many miles wide in some places, and over a hundred miles wide where it meets the ocean, gushing fifty-five million gallons of water into the Atlantic each second.

Colonists have similarities to beetles although are slightly bigger than humans. On Earth, because of the relatively low oxygen content of the atmosphere, their insect-like circulation is not very effective at getting oxygen around their bodies – which is why insects never grow particularly large here on Earth.

Our earth is the life-giving force for every living being, and life in it is derived from the energy generated from the invaluable elements of nature. The most important element among these invaluable elements is "Soil" which is the most indispensable component of our environment and from this the major energy of life is discharged. We place more emphasis on planting trees in the concept of keeping the environment safe and pure, but do not give much ponderability to the protection of the Soil that nourishes these trees. The proper nutrition of every seed is completely dependent on the fertilizing capacity of the Soil and the seeds which provide us fruits, flowers, oxygen etc., without which our lives and other living beings are not presumable. Soil mainly conducts the life of all beings including human beings, as well as the land of our earth is the most vital source of power, the most preciosity resource of our earth. Conserving the Soil is our utmost accountability so that in the coming times our environment can be made even more preferential. Without Soil no one life and isomorphism of our nature is not possible, since every living being is dependent on Soil itself; Soil is our complement and we are completely envolved with Soil. "Conservation of the Soil is the protection of lives, then save the Soil, save the lives.

I guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. You can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together. It’s like learning that you would be immortal if you could breathe nitrogen, but knowing you are bound to the oxygen of Earth.

Air is oxygen that empowers humans to circle and breathe around the earthy planet; spoiling it means destroying yourself. -- This Earth remains encircled and hung in its orbit based on its natural energy of minerals, gases, crude oil, water, and other things, but humans greedily want to take the minerals off the Earth. Factually, they have forgotten that the existence of the Earth cannot survive if these minerals become exhausted; consequently, the Planet Earth can no longer stay balanced in its orbit; thus, unfortunately, a poisoned climate will destroy this planet, and there will be no sign of life.

Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint. York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window. The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit. The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages, side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack—the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo—would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

Phosphorus is added to streams and enters the lake. Algae growth is stimulated, and a dense layer forms. (c) The algae layer becomes so dense that the algae at the bottom die. Bacteria feed on the dead algae and use up the oxygen. Finally, fish die from lack

What is it really that makes Earth Earth? The surface, where we live, exists at the interface between two giant heat engines: below us the churning mantle, above us the restless, windy troposphere. All rocky worlds large enough to hold an atmosphere will have some combination of these, and the dynamic possibilities of each realm have been substantially illuminated by the variations we’ve found on other worlds. We live on the convoluted, shifting shoreline between cycles of earth and sky that are incessantly driven by the Sun above and the heat below. So much about our world can be understood as the interplay between these inner and outer cycles. Life thrives at the boundary, enabled and sustained by the great cyclic flows of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorous. Still, something else is going on here.

Among these have been an unhealthy number of near-death moments, many of which I look back on now and wince. But I guess our training in life never really ends--and experience is always the best tutor of all. Then there are the most bizarre: like jet-skiing around Britain in aid of the UK lifeboats. Day after day, hour after hour, pounding the seas like little ants battling around the wild coast of Scotland and Irish Sea. (I developed a weird bulging muscle in my forearm that popped out and has stayed with me ever since after that one!) Or hosting the highest open-air dinner party, suspended under a high-altitude hot-air balloon, in support of the Duke of Edinburgh’s kids awards scheme. That mission also became a little hairy, rappelling down to this tiny metal table suspended fifty feet underneath the basket in minus forty degrees, some twenty-five thousand feet over the UK. Dressed in full naval mess kit, as required by the Guinness Book of World Records--along with having to eat three courses and toast the Queen, and breathing from small supplementary oxygen canisters--we almost tipped the table over in the early dawn, stratosphere dark. Everything froze, of course, but finally we achieved the mission and skydived off to earth--followed by plates of potatoes and duck à l-orange falling at terminal velocity. Or the time Charlie Mackesy and I rowed the Thames naked in a bathtub to raise funds for a friend’s new prosthetic legs. The list goes on and on, and I am proud to say, it continues. But I will tell all those stories properly some other place, some other time. They vary from the tough to the ridiculous, the dangerous to the embarrassing. But in this book I wanted to show my roots: the early, bigger missions that shaped me, and the even earlier, smaller moments that steered me.

Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in. As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world. Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us. As he approached, the wind began to die away. The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red. Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers. I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here. There truly was some magic to this place. The radio suddenly crackled to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly. “Base camp. We’ve run out of earth.” The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, but all that just fell apart. I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking. “I just want to get home.” The memory of what went on then begins to fade. We took several photos with both the SAS and the DLE flags flying on the summit, as promised, and I scooped some snow into an empty Juice Plus vitamin bottle I had with me.* It was all I would take with me from the summit. I remember having some vague conversation on the radio--patched through from base camp via a satellite phone--with my family some three thousand miles away: the people who had given me the inspiration to climb. But up there, the time flew by, and like all moments of magic, nothing can last forever. We had to get down. It was already 7:48 A.M. Neil checked my oxygen. “Bear, you’re right down. You better get going, buddy, and fast.” I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony. I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask, and turned around. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again. *Years later, Shara and I christened our three boys with this snow water from Everest’s summit. Life moments.

The Great Oxygenation Event was contemporaneous with one of the most severe ice ages this world has ever known, an event known to geo-nerds as the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth episode.* This was probably no coincidence. At the time, Earth’s climate was likely being kept above freezing by a methane greenhouse. Methane is such a powerful infrared absorber that a very small amount of it can significantly warm a planet. It is also, however, an organic molecule that is easily and eagerly consumed by oxygen. So when all that oxygen released by the cyanobacteria built up in the atmosphere, it quickly destroyed the methane greenhouse, the atmosphere suddenly became more transparent to infrared radiation, and the temperature plummeted, plunging our planet into a complete global freeze. Such a deeply frozen condition could even potentially become a permanent dead-end state for a planet like Earth.

Uncertainty hugs our every decision like the stratosphere hugs the Earth. It is as crucial a part of human existence as oxygen.

We might be excused our ignorance in this case, because ocean-atmosphere systems are, after all, almost inconceivably complex. Less easy to excuse is our astounding lack of knowledge of much more visible features of our planet’s natural resources and ecology—features that have a direct impact on our well-being. For instance, we know surprisingly little about the state of the planet’s soils. While we have good information for some areas, like the Great Plains of the United States, soil data are sketchy for vast tracts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where billions of people depend directly on agriculture for survival. So we can’t accurately judge how badly we’ve degraded these soils through overuse and poor husbandry, though we do have patchy evidence that the damage is severe and getting worse in many places.18 Similarly, despite extensive satellite photography, our estimates of the rate and extent of tropical deforestation are rudimentary. We know even less about the natural ecology and species diversity inside these forests, where biologists presume most animal and plant species live. As a result, credible figures on the number of Earth’s species range from 5 to 30 million.19 And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds.

We know a great deal more than the Greeks did about the forces of life. But with all our knowledge, no one fully comprehends the miraculous process, known as photosynthesis, by which trees and other green plants use energy from the sun to transform elements into food for themselves at the same time that they release oxygen into the atmosphere. Photosynthesis makes life on Earth possible, and it is the most important function performed by green plants of all kinds.

Second, a huge part of plankton is made up of plants or other organisms that have chlorophyll and produce their own food. As a side effect of this process, the oceans produce 50 percent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere, 95 percent of which comes from phytoplankton and 5 percent from bigger algae (kelp and seaweed) or the few marine vascular plants that live near shore.

Every breath we take from the air Takes oxygen from an insect’s lungs mid-prayer And every exhalation does loudly declare That in the currency of life, we’re millionaires. A butterfly flapped it’s wings and Rome fell A passerby’s whistle cracked the liberty bell And I dare urge the daring not to yell Lest we so bid a skyscraper a rough farewell. A snake’s tongue slithered and man did sin Let me tell you how the waves from a shark’s fin Did set the tides on D-Day and let the allies win; Chance and destiny are identical twins. A word was spoken and the earth created Another phrase and the future was dictated And so every action must be carefully weighted We just never know how things are interrelated.

The air was fresh, nothing like the circulated air on the spaceship. Hell, she was just glad she hadn’t dropped dead stepping off the ship, she realized. Luxirians breathed the same oxygen she breathed on Earth. At least she would be able to survive there, something she hadn’t even thought of before now.

Some unknown process was, it seemed, protecting CO2 from the anticipated destruction. This unexpected and strange stability presented a puzzle, which was solved by Michael McElroy at Harvard and Ron Prinn9 at MIT, two atmospheric scientists whose careers have straddled earth and planetary science. The answer, they found, lay in the highly reactive element chlorine. Even minuscule amounts of chlorine in such an environment wreak outsize havoc on oxygen compounds, catalyzing their destruction and reconstituting CO2. Modeling Venus in the early 1970s, McElroy and Prinn showed that you would not expect ozone to survive in an environment where stray chlorine atoms were running

This afforded an opportunity for a close encounter with Earth as it might appear to an alien spacecraft, and Carl Sagan proposed using this as a “control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft.” The instruments detected the spectral signature of the chlorophyll from green plants, and signs of an obviously life-altered atmosphere. As Sagan and colleagues wrote in their paper “A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft” published in Nature, they found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane

celled. Then a catastrophe occurred (in the sense of sudden change), a dramatic increase in biodiversity, an anti-extinction, if you will. In a flash, there were not just some animal forms, but all of them. In the fossil record, all modern body types appear together at this moment. We don’t know why this happened when it did. It’s likely that the explosion had to wait until oxygen levels rose high enough to support the greater energy needs of larger bodies,

Yet among the multiple animal inventions at the dawn of the Cambrian were new forms of mobility. A number of critters began burrowing into these mats and braving the toxic soils beneath them. These digging, tunneling creatures are known as “bioturbators,” basically life that stirs up the ground. In fact, the fossils that officially define the beginning of the Cambrian in the geological record, Trichophycus pedum, are identified by the looping, burrowing patterns they left in the seafloor. Once this bioturbating disturbance of the Cambrian seafloor got started, it began changing the texture and chemistry of the dirt in ways that made it more inviting for other burrowing creatures. Oxygen began penetrating the loosened soil beneath the mats, neutralizing the lethal hydrogen sulfide. This started a positive feedback.

More than fifty years have passed since the flask experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey rekindled the primordial soup hypothesis for the origin of life. Scientists now realize, however, that generating miniscule amounts of a few amino acids is irrelevant to the origin of life because the chemicals in Miller and Urey’s experiment were exposed to neither oxygen nor ultraviolet light. The fact that Earth never possessed measurable quantities of prebiotics (see p. 73) and that the universe appears devoid of reservoirs for life’s fundamental chemical building blocks (see p. 74) also argues for the famed experiment’s irrelevance. As far back as 1973, a deep sense of frustration over any possible naturalistic explanation for life’s origin on Earth or anywhere else within the vast reaches of interstellar space led Francis Crick (who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix nature of DNA) and Leslie Orgel (one of the world’s preeminent origin-of-life researchers) to suggest that intelligent aliens must have salted Earth with bacteria about 3.8 billion years ago.[24] This suggestion, however intriguing or bizarre, fails to answer the question of where the aliens might have come from. It also contradicts evidence that shows intelligent life could not have arrived on the cosmic scene any sooner than about 13.7 billion years after the cosmic origin event. The implausibility of interstellar space travel also remains an intractable problem. Ruling out a visit by aliens from a planetary system far, far away narrows the reasonable options down to one: Something or Someone from beyond the physics and dimensions of the universe, who is not subject to them, placed life and humanity in the only location in the universe at the only time in cosmic history where and when such creatures could survive and thrive.

But water alone does not generate oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, or yield the simple sugars that are the basis of food production powering most of life on Earth. By itself, water does not produce the dimethyl sulfide molecules around which water gathers to form vapor that becomes clouds that in turn become rain, sleet, and snow. Microscopic photosynthetic organisms in the sea do all of these things and much more.

Earth, for example, is made up of oxygen (almost 50 percent) and smaller amounts of iron (19 percent), silicon (14 percent), magnesium (12.5 percent),

SONG OF THE STAR I am nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, A luminous sphere of plasma Held together by helium and gravity, And like a balloon I float on earth, Waiting to be released back into the sky, Waiting to go back in the reverse Direction from which I came, Traveling through a warm tunnel of light, And out into a cold, dark abyss Where I will explode into a thousand pieces. I shall leave behind my body, Just like air abandons the skin of a shattered balloon, And the magnetic dust that carries my Heart and spirit will lift us back To congregate and shine With the stars. Home again, In the fluorescent Kingdom of the constellations, I will once again be called by My soul’s true name. And my heart, It will flicker again, With every memory from its many Lifetimes, And with every wish Made by a child. SONG OF THE STAR by Suzy Kassem Copyright 1993

At times the discourse of the anthropic philosophers sounded as if they thought the world was made for us rather than the other way around. Planet Earth is at exactly the right distance from the sun to create the right temperature for human life, and its atmosphere has the ideal oxygen level. How convenient! Instead of seeing purpose in this situation, however, any biologist will turn the causal connection around and note that our species is finely adapted to the planet’s circumstances, which explains why they are perfect for us. Deep ocean vents are an optimal environment for bacteria thriving on their superhot sulfuric output, but no one assumes that these vents were created to serve thermophile bacteria; rather, we understand that natural selection has shaped bacteria able to live near them.

«I flew the company’s last trip. The shuttle was packed with people not returning to Earth. They’d decided to spend the rest of their lives up there.’ ‘Didn’t you want to stay up there?’ Roar laughed again. It sounded bitter. ‘I was given the choice, actually. Amongst the passengers I flew on that last trip were the director of the company and his family. He tried to persuade me. Said there wasn’t anything left on Earth. That it was all going downhill. That it was in the new worlds that there was hope.’ ‘Wasn’t he right? Why didn’t you stay?’ ‘Yes, he was right. I don’t know. I was so tired of travelling in space at that point. I longed to be on Earth, where I could breathe normally without oxygen replacement, where I could walk around freely with no restrictions. I didn’t have to stay indoors or wear spacesuits. It might sound crazy, but the last years I flew, I struggled with claustrophobia. It’s odd, the infinite space and all. But I felt so trapped.’ ‘Do you regret it?’ ‘Every day, kid. Every day. I look up at the stars in the night and wish I was there. They seem so far away, but they aren’t. It’s just a short flight. It’s killing me.»

MONDAY, JUNE 2 Breath of Life He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds [curing their pains and their sorrows]. PSALM 147:3 AMP As a result of sin, every person on the earth is born into a fallen world. The sinful condition brings hurt and heartache to all men—those who serve the Lord and those who don’t. The good news is, as a child of God, you have a hope and eternal future in Christ. Jesus said, “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 NLT). When your life brings disappointment, hurt, and pain that are almost unbearable, remember that you serve the One who heals hearts. He knows you best and loves you most. When the wind is knocked out of you and you feel like there is no oxygen left in the room, let God provide you with the air you need to breathe. Breathe out a prayer to Him and breathe in His peace and comfort today. Lord, be my breath of life, today and always. Amen.

While iron oxide makes up over 6% of the Earth’s crust, it took a long time for mankind to figure out how to convert dirt into something as useful as steel. The first smelting of iron from ore was probably accidental when some iron-bearing ore was mixed in with the copper ore during the smelting of copper. Iron ore is composed mostly of various iron oxides which need to be reduced – have oxygen removed – to form metallic iron. The iron ore was mixed with charcoal, which is mostly carbon, and fired. The carbon dioxide produced by burning charcoal combines with the hot carbon in the charcoal, forming carbon monoxide. The hot carbon monoxide turns again to carbon dioxide by stealing oxygen from – reducing – the iron oxides, leaving metallic iron behind. But the heat needed for melting copper isn’t nearly sufficient to melt the iron that may be present in the copper ore. The reaction from ore to iron occurs while in a solid state when the iron forms into a solid, ugly mass of spongy metal called a bloom. The bloom’s cavities were full of slag (molten impurities from the smelting) that needed to be removed. Someone must have recognized the spongy mass as a metallic substance, probably by using appropriate scientific methodology such as hitting it with a rock. Eventually, the bloom was processed by heating it to the slag’s melting point and hammering on it until all of the slag had squirted out. This would be hard, dangerous and resource-intensive work as the iron was reheated and beaten over and over to produce wrought iron. This process was the way iron was made from late B.C. to early A.D.

Earth alone in all the solar system contains a “zone of life.” Only here can water remain liquid, and oxygen abounds in free, active form. While all this may seem odd to people who do not believe in God, nothing about the Earth seems odd to the Christians. The Bible tells us that: The earth is the LORD ’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters. PSALM 24:1–2

Anthropic Principle implies that when we look at the world around us, it would seem, at least at first blush, that the universe was somehow designed to support and nourish human life. This concept, which is very prevalent in the world of secular science and philosophy, didn’t originate with Christian scholars. But the evidence points so overwhelmingly toward this apparent design in the universe that it’s virtually undeniable by experts of every religious and nonreligious stripe. This has sent skeptics scurrying to find some sort of natural explanation for this apparently supernatural phenomenon. Here are a few of the hard facts:         Raise or lower the universe’s rate of expansion by even one part in a million, and it would have ruled out the possibility of life.       If the average distance between stars were any greater, planets like earth would not have been formed; any smaller, the planetary orbits necessary for life would not have occurred.       If the ratio of carbon to oxygen had been slightly different than it is, none of us would have been here to breathe the air.       Change the tilt of the earth’s axis slightly in one direction, and we would freeze. Change it the other direction, and we’d burn up.       Suppose the earth had been a bit closer or further from the sun, or just a little larger or smaller, or if it rotated at a speed any different from the one we’re spinning at right now. Given any of these changes, the resulting temperature variations would be completely fatal.   So the lesson we can draw from the Anthropic Principle is this: someone must have gone to a lot of effort to make things just right so that you and I could be here to enjoy life. In short, modern science points to the fact that we must really matter to God! Being the ever-obedient

Living beings wide and far are creatively enticed into the idea of living only on the substance of leafy greenery by alluring allegations that seem to make apparent sense. Some want to avoid the dying aspect of life and prolong the bodily functions of their organs within their potential corpses over time and reduce the waste products given off by our walking structures to lessen worldly contamination. Others want to avoid consuming Earth’s usual containing features from being overly exhumed, or because we have never not lovingly smothered Earth’s natural oxygen sucking creatures, and so we do not consume the things that are taking nutrients from us so that we can preserve them instead, because we find it morally dissatisfying.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

Prince Yosef glanced at the bright anomaly and also wondered if it would ever cease existing or if it were to be a permanent addition to the night sky. “But then, what is permanent? The stars that men gaze on, are they really there? The atmosphere of the earth, has it always been oxygen? Could it not have been another substance? The animals on the earth, were they always as they were or were there different types?” Yosef pondered. “How often have oceans risen and fallen? “The mysterious light that has been present since Miriam’s conception, does it descend from a star that is real or from a star that had perished eons ago? Do our words somehow remain, captured in the atmosphere, waiting to return to someone’s ears. The internal energy of man—his soul—when it perishes, as it must, will the man whom it embraced be forgotten? “Ideologies, how often do they change? Every generation? Every hundred years? Every thousand years? Mohse wrote the books of constant law! Ezra sealed them, making them unchangeable! But then the Greeks came. They invaded the world with different ideas. Different ways of discerning truth! Cyrus came before them with his Zoroastrianism, challenging the established Marduk! Can Yehuway’s truth reside alongside Greeks and Babylonian philosophers? No. For man is a thing inside Yehuway, and without Yehuway, what can be? Can Yehuway perish leaving us behind?” Yosef shook his head. “No! Yehuway’s essence cannot perish! Nothing exists without Yehuway! The Greeks’ intellect, how cunning is its invasion into the concrete reality of Mohse! Hellenistic thoughts have penetrated and conquered the P’rushim’ and Tz’dukim’ intellect. Immortality of the soul! No resurrection! No angels. Heaven’s reward and hell’s damnation according to one’s earthly deeds! All invasive Greek ideologies that are steadfastly adhering and corrupting the Mosaic truths. The Greeks’ intellect is an infectious intellect, founded on nothing but myth and fantasy. “It is man’s spirit that transcends itself to wait in a holding place in Yehuway’s memory. The Greeks declared a heaven and a hell. A tormenting residence and a rewarding residence. Such invasive thoughts are hideous to me. Paganism at its supreme level! The soul perishes. All thoughts become nonexistent! The body is consumed by the earth’s processes. A well versed man in the laws of Yehuway could not accept anything else! I will teach my son to be aware of false tautologies. “It is the personality of the individual that is remembered by Yehuway and it is that exact personality that is brought back to life. It will come back in a different body. In a different tone of voice. But the mannerisms will be the same. The intellect identical. “Yet, what man can return if the Mashi’ach fails in his mission to ransom man’s sins? What man may dwell alongside his past, risen ancestors if the Mashi’ach fails? What man can be if the Mashi’ach fails? What future can there be? Before Adam was created there was void! What is void? It is nothingness. It is total darkness! Total nonexistence. No thoughts. No light. No stars. No motions of the wind or of the seas.

Aluminum is a metallic element—one of the principal constituents of the earth's crust. Only oxygen and silicon are more abundant. Aluminum does not occur naturally in its pure form, but only in a wide variety of compounds.

This premise can be applied to life on the planet today. The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen. The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity. “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy,” said Szent-Györgyi. The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the principle has remained the same. Szent-Györgyi apparently took that advice. He died in 1986, at the age of 93. •

The cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic bacteria tinted blue-green by chlorophyll and other pigments, harvest sunlight and fix CO2 much like eukaryotic algae and land plants. However, when hydrogen sulfide (H2S, well known for its “rotten egg” smell) is present, many cyanobacteria use this gas rather than water to supply the electrons needed for photosynthesis. Sulfur and sulfate are formed as by-products, but oxygen is not.

The fact that changed my life was that somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from the sea. I had always thought that the forests and the trees and plants around us were responsible for the air we breathe, but they are only a bit player in the oxygen cycle upon which life on this planet depends.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s

To invent ways for people to be well nourished by means of chemically prepared food and to make the forces of nature work for them, while the distribution of property and labour remains wrong is the same as inventing a means of pumping oxygen into the lungs of a man who is locked up in a room with bad air, when all that need be done is to stop keeping the man in the locked room. No professors will ever set up a laboratory for the production of food that is better than the one that has been set up in the vegetable and animal world, and to use the fruits of this laboratory and participate in it, man has only to give himself to the ever-joyful need for labour, without which man's life is a torment. And here the scientists of our age, instead of applying all their forces to removing what hinders man from using these blessings prepared for him, recognize the situation in which man is deprived of these blessings as immutable, and, instead of arranging the life of men so that they could work joyfully and be nourished by the earth, they devise ways of turning them into artificial freaks. It is the same as if instead of taking a man from a locked room out into the fresh air. one invented ways of pumping the necessary oxygen into him. enabling him to live not in a house but in a stuffy basement.

It is not the amount of oxygen that determines flammability, but its proportion in the mixture with nitrogen.

That is a very common misconception, even in the scientific community, except for people who specialize in biology. On Earth today, plants such as trees do generate substantial amounts of free oxygen. However, single-celled organisms utilizing photosynthesis converted Earth's atmosphere billions of years ago, from an anaerobic state, to a state saturated with free oxygen. This was long before the appearance of any land plants; the buildup of free oxygen was delayed by minerals on the surface, such as iron, absorbing the free oxygen until the mineral base became saturated. At that point, we think the free oxygen reduced the amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, so falling methane levels triggered Earth's first ice age. That may be what happened

Air is oxygen that empowers humans to circle and breathe around the earthy planet; spoiling it means destroying yourself. -- This Earth remains encircled and hung in its orbit based on its natural energy of minerals, gases, crude oil, water, and other things, but humans greedily want to take the minerals off the Earth. Factually, they have forgotten that the existence of the Earth cannot survive if these minerals become exhausted from it; consequently, the Planet Earth can no longer stay balanced in its orbit; thus, unfortunately, a poisoned climate will destroy this planet, and there will be no sign of life.

Water in space would be hugely valuable, far more so the gold, given the cost of hauling water up from Earth. On b moon, water would support life, and using electrolysis (pass ing an electric current through it) water can be broken dow into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel. The moon could become a filling station outside Earth's deep gravity field that could be used to support a general expansion ins the solar system, just as was dreamed of before Apollo.

At the start of the day he was given a dose of carbogen, a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen that was used as a benchmark at the clinic to determine how the subject might react to psychedelic drugs. The effect was immediate: as Brand later described it, he went to a “very interesting” other universe for what he thought must have been “seven eternities.

The core of the global bioplan is a simple idea. If every person on Earth planted one tree per year for the next six years, we would stop climate change in its tracks. The addition of those wonderful molecular machines, which pull carbon from our atmosphere, fix it in wood and bubble out oxygen in return, would halt the rise in global temperature and return it to a manageable level. Three hundred million years ago, trees took an environment with a toxic load of carbon and turned it into something that could sustain human life. They can do it again.

The Earth’s breathable atmosphere is typically comprised of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, a little less than 1 percent argon, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, and hydrogen

Planktonic algae produce 60 per cent of all Earth’s oxygen through photosynthesis and will be adversely affected by global warming and ocean acidification. Adult fish and even adult krill appear to tolerate changes in acidity reasonably well, but at larval levels marine animals can be sensitive to temperature, salinity, acidity and calcium saturation. If all these factors go haywire, there is likely to be a collapse of the species that forms the basis of the food chain.

Prospector Base was a cluster of five ten-meter-diameter inflatable domes, arranged in a tight pentagonal formation. Each dome touched two others on either side for mutual support against the fierce spring winds of the southern hemisphere. The void in the center of the pentagon was filled with a smaller dome, seven-and-a-half meters in diameter. The only equipment the central dome contained was the base water recycler unit. The recycler received wastewater from the galley, and from the shower and sink. Dubbed “the hall” by the EPSILON engineers, hatches connected the smaller central dome with each of the larger five domes that surrounded it. Each large dome was accessible to the others only via the hall. The larger dome closest to the landing party’s direction of travel possessed an airlock to the outside atmosphere. Known as the common room, it housed the main base computer, the communications equipment, the primary electrical supply panels, the CO2 scrubber, the oxygen generator and the backup oxygen supply tanks. The oxygen generator electrolyzed water collected from dehumidifiers located in all domes except the greenhouse and from the CO2 scrubber. It released molecular oxygen directly back into the air supply. The hydrogen it generated was directed to the carbon dioxide scrubber. By combining the Sabatier Reaction with the pyrolysis of waste product methane, the only reaction products were water—which was sent back to the oxygen generator—and graphite. The graphite was removed from a small steel reactor vessel once a week and stored in the shop where Dave and Luis intended to test the feasibility of carbon fiber manufacture. Excess heat generated by the water recycler, the oxygen generator, and the CO2 scrubber supplemented the heat output from the base heating system. The dome to the immediate left contained the crew sleeping quarters and a well-provisioned sick bay. The next dome housed the galley, food storage, and exercise equipment. The table in the galley doubled as the base conference table. The fourth large dome served as the greenhouse. It also housed the composting toilet and a shower. The final dome contained the shop, an assay bench, and a small smelter. The smelter was intended to develop proof-of-concept smelting processes for the various rare earth elements collected from the surrounding region. Subsequent Prospector missions would construct and operate a commercial smelter. A second manual airlock was attached to the shop dome to allow direct unloading of ore and loading of ingots for shipment to Earth.

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear. I have inhabited each and know one to feel deceptively like the other.

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. Hans Reiter defied this rule from the moment he was born. He didn’t like the earth, much less forests. He didn’t like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he liked was the seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren’t plains and valleys that weren’t valleys and cliffs that weren’t cliffs. • When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn’t lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them. • Once, his one-legged father, who sometimes watched as his one-eyed mother bathed him, told her not to lift him out, to see what he would do. From the bottom of the washtub Hans Reiter’s blue eyes gazed up at his mother’s blue eye, and then he turned on his side and remained very still, watching the fragments of his body drift away in all directions, like space probes launched at random across the universe. When he ran out of breath he stopped watching the tiny particles as they were lost in the distance and set out after them. He turned red and understood that he was passing through a region very like hell. But he didn’t open his mouth or make the slightest attempt to come up, although his head was only four inches below the surface and the seas of oxygen. Finally his mother’s arms lifted him out and he began to cry. His father, wrapped in an old military cloak, looked down at the floor and spat into the center of the hearth.

A lit candle contains all five elements: fire, earth, air, water, and spirit. The flame itself is fire, the base of the candle that holds it steady is earth, the oxygen that sustains it is air, the wax that pools is water, and when you infuse your energy into the candle, you are spirit. When you perform candle magic, you are invoking the elements and merging them with your intention.

Once, when humankind had been far more naïve, some scientists had believed that it was possible to detect the presence of distant civilizations by astronomical observation: for instance, the absorption spectral signatures of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor in exoplanetary atmospheres, or electromagnetic emissions. They even came up with whimsical notions like searching for signs of Dyson spheres. But we found ourselves in a universe in which every civilization endeavored to hide itself. If no signs of intelligence could be detected in a solar system from far away, it was possible that it really was desolate, but it was also possible that the civilization there had truly matured.

take the dust and gas left over, allow it to clump together for about two hundred million years, until it makes one giant rock with an iron core. Then hurl another really big rock into your new planet so the pieces can fly off to form the moon. Without the moon, Earth would be unstable and its climates too severe for any complex life to survive. And make sure to tilt your planet’s axis exactly twenty-three and a half degrees so you’ll get the seasons.” “Seasons, got it. What’s next?” Annika prompts. He shakes his head at her, clearly amused by her unwillingness to give up, but continues. “You’ll need movable tectonic plates, of course, to keep a steady supply of nutrients at the surface. And don’t forget the oceans. You’d have to fill them. Take some water-bearing comets, add some volcanoes, and the atmosphere will start to fill with water vapor. Then here come the rains! And once you have water, and much later breathable oxygen, then—

this meeting, passing back out into the world through the parted lips of the stomata—becoming the air we breathe. The carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that remains is spun into strands of sugary glucose. To be precise, it takes six molecules of carbon dioxide and six molecules of water, torn apart by power from the sun, to form six molecules of oxygen and—the true aim of this whole process—one precious molecule of glucose. The plant uses the glucose to build new leaves, which will be used to make more glucose. It also shuttles the glucose down through its body, passing it into its underground architecture, where it is used to grow more roots, which will pull more water back up through its body,