NASA–Now scientists at the American space agency Nasa have found that the Earth’s crust is a vast natural reservoir of hydrogen which has become trapped in ancient rocks. The team made its discovery while trying to explain how bacteria live many miles below the Earth’s surface. Such bugs have no access to sunlight, forcing them to rely on another source of energy for life. Scientists suspected that hydrogen was the source. According to Professor Friedemann Freund and colleagues at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California, the gas is produced when water molecules trapped inside molten rock break down to release hydrogen. “In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth’s crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen,” said Professor Freund. (04/16/02)
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Lise Maring writes: “It has been my experience that the more we humans try to “control” things, whether synergetically or otherwise, the less control we actually have, and the more “out of control” things become.” …  Dr. Wilken reponds: We humans are a form of Life. We evolved on planet Earth for some reason. Some like Carl Sagan said it was to bring intelligence to Universe. Our problem is not so much the control that results from that power, but what we do with it. Arthur Young tells us one of the most important contributions to our understanding of Universe and Humanity is the discovery of the scientific basis for control. Control is the very basis of LIFE. When a living system makes a choice based on the knowledge of its needs, based on the knowledge of its abilities it is making a controlled choice. When a living system chooses with knowledge, it is making a controlled choice. Now how we control depends on what we believe the rules to be! And, upon whom we give responsibility for that control. (04/16/02)
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Elisabet Sahtouris writes: The constant hail of meteors, leaving craters such as we see on the Moon, was a serious threat. Though meteors may have contributed important molecules such as lipids to the formation of microbes, they might also have killed them off again. Every day these space rocks of all sizes came hurling from the sky like bullets. If nothing had happened to protect the Earth from them, it might well have ended up as lifeless and pockmarked as the Moon and our neighboring planets. There may also have been another problem, though scientists differ on this matter. The Sun’s energy was most helpful in splitting molecules so that new ones could form, but as the first microbes formed and multiplied, the strong Sunlight may have been too much for many of them to stand, putting them in need of protection from the burning part of Sunlight we call ultraviolet radiation. Some ultraviolet is good for living creatures, but too much can burn them, and our young Sun probably produced far more ultraviolet than it does today, when we are concerned about our own threat to the shield of ozone protecting us from it — a shield that did not exist at all around the early Earth, though the smoggy early atmosphere may have offered some protection. In any case, the first microbes seem to have formed on the seafloor, in seawater or wet mud deep enough to filter out the dangerous rays. There, as we saw in the last chapter, bits of a rich soup of organic molecules and seawater were probably trapped in liposome spheres where the molecules could move about and begin new kinds of chemical cycles. These would have included, had they not already been formed elsewhere, the construction of the giant RNA and DNA molecules that became useful as a storage system for information life needed. (04/16/02)
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Wendell Berry wrote: The word “health,” in fact, comes from the same Indo-European root as “heal,” “whole,” and “holy” To be healthy is literally to be whole; to heal is to make whole. I don’t think mortal healers should be credited with the power to make holy. But I have no doubt that such healers are properly obliged to acknowledge and respect the holiness embodied in all creatures, or that our healing involves the preservation in us of the spirit and the breath of God. If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live. Anyhow, we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided. … I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. We speak now of “spirituality and healing” as if the only way to render a proper religious respect to the body is somehow to treat it “spiritually.” It could be argued just as appropriately (and perhaps less dangerously) that the way to respect the body fully is to honor fully its materiality. In saying this, I intend no reduction. I do not doubt the reality of the experience and knowledge we call “spiritual” any more than I doubt the reality of so-called physical experience and knowledge; I recognize the rough utility of these terms. But I strongly doubt the advantage, and even the possibility, of separating these two realities. (04/16/02)
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