Another line of demarcation in my work is 2006. In the summer of 2006, I wasted a month interacting with Richard Stallman, who was a classic Level 3. I was seven years into my monster of a midlife crisis. After a decade of trying, I finally stopped drinking in 2000, helped by my weekly hiking with my friend Brent. If I had not stopped drinking then, I might not be here today. But I was in constant emotional agony, as I wrestled with the idea that my life’s work was an exercise in futility. And then, one day in late August, Dennis Lee arrived at my home, to invite me to the White House, for an eve-of-the-election demonstration of his technologies, arranged by George Bush the Second’s energy advisor. I wanted nothing to do with that, or be on the board of Dennis’s latest venture. When I read the FTC’s charges against Dennis in 2009, I thanked my lucky stars that I declined the invitation. Otherwise, the feds would have arrived at my home. I already had enough of that for a lifetime.
After Dennis left, my wife began insisting that I get professional help, and not for the first time. I did, the clouds soon parted, and I began engaging the public again, in forums where I had seen my work discussed. I soon discovered that the Internet had devolved into a sewer during the previous several years. Trolls swarmed wherever I appeared, and several times, trolls allied with forum admins to chase or kick me out of forums. It was surreal. One such forum is a likely CIA front, where that leading space debunker, who attacked Brian O’Leary’s Martian credentials, held court the last time I looked.
As an aside, this weekend, I became aware that Mr. Skeptic recently attempted to contact me. As I have stated, I was more than half-convinced that he worked for the global elite in some capacity. With this latest contact, my wife thinks that he is likely just a pathologically obsessed individual. He once confessed to me that he once belonged to a religious cult. Maybe he is just that strange. As I have stated, whether he was on somebody’s payroll or not is not that important. It is psychologically more interesting if he is free-lancing and serving some twisted ego needs, and if so, it would be another example of how we do almost all of the dirty work for the global elite, gratis.
But after my midlife crisis ended, I began the studies that resulted in my lifetime’s most ambitious essay, which I wrote in a year, in 2013-2014. While the many subjects that I had studied since 1989 were important to me and my writings, after 2006, I resumed my science studies in earnest, for the first time since 1977, when I was in college. As I stated, it was mostly popularized science, but popularized science is plenty for the people that I seek. I read my first Peter Ward book in 2004, on the megafauna extinctions. I have 11 of his books on the bookcase behind me as I write this. I later had an amazing exchange with him. Ward stated that his popularizing work did nothing for his career. Universities and other organizations did not care that he wrote for the lay public. They only cared about scientific papers and other “prestige” work. Educating the public on science did not help Ward’s career at all. It was just a labor of love for him.
When I resumed my science studies, Ward was among a raft of authors that I studied on the history of life on Earth. All of Nick Lane’s books are a treasured part of my library. I read many books and scientific papers on the journey of life on Earth, which are evident in the references to that big essay. It is all interesting to me, but what I found particularly enthralling was early life on Earth, when the most important developments happened. Without them, there would not be life on Earth as we know it, and the most important ones were around the energy issue. Life has always primarily been about energy and information. Energy built and ran life, and information was so that life could reproduce itself. I doubt that scientists will ever fully unravel those miraculous mysteries, beginning with how life began.
I like Nick Lane’s idea that life on Earth began in volcanic vents (white smokers) on the ocean floor, but there are other hypotheses. Ward and Joe Kirschvink argued that life may have begun on Mars. Others have hypothesized freshwater environments, and others have proposed that ETs may have intentionally seeded life on Earth.
However life began, it soon evolved to make chemical reactions easier to accomplish, with enzymes. It is also theorized that RNA preceded DNA, and RNA may have also been an early enzyme. That scenario certainly reduced the moving parts necessary for life to happen, and it is an intriguing series of hypotheses. Enzymes speed up chemical reactions by up to billions of times, and without enzymes, life as we know it would not exist.
Lane and others think that the earliest life took advantage of the chemical potential in what those volcanic vents spewed out, before water could react with those chemicals, and the energy in those reactions fueled early life. Soon, some organism learned to capture photon energy, and it is hypothesized that infrared light from the volcanic vents is the first light captured by life, and photosynthesis began. Eventually, as those organisms evolved to survive past volcanic vents, some began to harness sunlight. None of these hypotheses are completely accepted by all scientists and likely never will be, but I am tracing the state of thought on what seem to be the likely events. A generation from now, the leading hypotheses may radically change, which is how science is supposed to work, if the evidence warrants it. Fortunately, huge commercial interests are indifferent to such investigations, so paleology is a relatively uncorrupted branch of science.
Electron transport chains are the primary drivers of ATP synthesis, ATP is the universal coin of energy for all life on Earth today, and how life gets those electrons has been a key issue for billions of years. Early life was either chemosynthetic or photosynthetic, and just when life began eating life (grazing, predation, parasitism, detrivory) are enduring areas of investigation. But the watershed moment for all life on Earth was when a photosynthesizer evolved to split water to get its electrons. That was not an easy trick, as water is not easy to split. Today, scientists think that that event happened only once, with one organism. When water is split that way, oxygen is the waste byproduct, and that one bacterium saved life on Earth.
There were many ramifications to splitting water like that. That event is thought to have happened around three billion years ago. Oxygen is highly reactive, with the second-most “greed” for electrons to fill its outer electron shell, next to fluorine. So, it is never found floating around by itself to any significant degree on any planet in our solar system, other than Earth. That is also why water is not easy to split. That 21% oxygen level on Earth today is because of oxygenic photosynthesis. Sunlight has ultraviolet light in it, which can break many electron bonds and damage life’s molecules. Ultraviolet light can split water, resulting in hydrogen gas. In our oxygenated atmosphere, such hydrogen atoms soon bond with atmospheric oxygen, to reform water. Otherwise, that hydrogen would eventually escape to space. Also, that atmospheric oxygen formed the ozone layer that absorbs most ultraviolet light. So, that atmospheric oxygen reduced the chances of water’s getting split by ultraviolent light, as well as help ensure the “recapture” any hydrogen that was released by splitting water. If that did not happen, Earth’s ocean would have been blasted into space long ago, and that would have been the end of life on Earth as we know it. Venus and Mars lost their water, but that lone bacterium that learned to split water saved Earth’s water, and all evolution since then has that lone bacterium to thank. Maybe another one would have done it, but again, it is not an easy trick.
Another impact of liberating oxygen in that way was that oxygen, being so electron-greedy, readily strips electrons from life itself, and some scientists think that when the atmosphere got oxygenated, it killed off most life on Earth. Others think that life that could not handle oxygen just went underground to escape oxygen (the process was a very long one), and humans can see that anaerobic (oxygen-free) world by just digging a little in the sand on a beach, and the black stuff not far down is anaerobic life.
While life at that time could not handle oxygen, some life soon learned how to adapt to oxygen and use it for feats that led to us. Electron transport chains end with the atom that accepts that electron. More than accept it, that atom attracts it. Before oxygenic photosynthesis was invented, oxygen was generally unavailable for life’s processes, but life soon made use of oxygen’s electron “greed,” and put oxygen at the end of that electron transport chain. Oxygen acted like a huge vacuum, sucking electrons down that transport chain like never before, and aerobic respiration was born. Aerobic respiration generated several times more energy than previous respiration methods, and that made complex life possible. Without aerobic respiration, complex life such as us would have likely never evolved. That is what splitting that water molecule by that bacterium led to.
Sometime later, maybe hundreds of millions of years later, an Archaean (a type of bacterium) either swallowed or was invaded by a bacterium, they formed a partnership and that bacterium became the first mitochondrion. Scientists also think that that event happened only once, and all complex life on Earth today is descended from that single union. Mitochondria are the energy centers of complex cells. A human is 10% mitochondria by weight.
Those events all happened far more than one billion years ago, and the result of all of those events is that complex life burns energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produces it, pound-for-pound. There is nothing else like it in the known universe. Life is a miracle on many levels.
This is one of many areas of science that I studied after 2006, and I try to keep up on new findings in those areas and many others. It really is far more fun for me than studying how the media lies, the USA’s imperial rampages, the global rackets, etc. Studying those scientific areas has been one of my journey’s compensations. On my SAT report, you can see that I listed biochemistry as my planned area of study. It was little more than a boy’s dream at the time. The past generation of study has been very enjoyable on those issues, but it is not just for fun. It became clear to me in those studies that energy is the entire ballgame on Earth, from the earliest life to today, as our energy practices have our toes over the edge of the abyss. I know how to solve it, but I can’t do it alone.
I want to stress that I do not expect anybody to come to my perspective how I did. We all have our paths. Mine was a circuitous route, of early education, then abandonment of my scientific studies, to soon get the education of my life in the real world, to again become studious. I know who I am looking for, but they all had their unique paths. But all sincere and questing paths for the healing of humanity and Earth will lead to the energy issue. It can’t really be avoided, for genuine seekers who want to solve our existential threats and help humanity achieve a new Epoch.