Red Shirt
Jan 26th, 2013, 05:07 PM
(Hey, nikvoodoo, as verbose as I tend to be and I am about to get, I'm horrible at properly titling. So feel free to re-title this appropriately.)
Alright everyone, I have been going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole off and on for the past week or so and spent the better part of the day today putting this together and I think I've nailed it. A decent theory of the underlying cause and how it worked.
2400
Hold on to your hats everyone, I'm about to get overly sciency up in here!
The only good way for me to get this out of my head effectively is to do so chronologically and start from the beginning. So lets get started.
Hadean Eon: 4567.17 - 4000 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean) which was followed by the
Archean Eon: 4000 - 2500 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean) and the period of
Late Heavy Bombardment (Late Heavy Bombardment) that straddled the end of the Hadean and the beginning of the Archean
(When I said beginning, I wasn't BS'ing. Here's a more comprehensive timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timetable_of_the_Precambrian).)
From the Hadean article, which echoes pretty much everything I had previously learned about the formation of the earth:
It is unlikely that life could have formed and established itself in the extreme, volatile conditions of the Hadean. If life had begun to form at this time, it most likely would have been destroyed several times, being forced to start over again. It is probable, however, that the building blocks necessary for life as humans know it were formed at some point during this time. Life would be granted a true start in the succeeding Archean Eon, after conditions on Earth began to stabilize.
No sense in retyping it, I'll quote it instead. It says everything I wanted to. However, one theoretical vector worth mentioning is Panspermia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) with Extremophiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile). Bombardment might have brought life to Earth on stellar debris or, Earth might have been a source of life in that the bombardment might have taken Hadean or Archean Proto-life with it on ejecta thrown into space... (I'll be coming back to that later.)
After the Archean Eon was the
Proterozoic Eon: 2500 - 541 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proterozoic) (That end date range will be important soon.)
Now, this is a a bit of an oversimplification, but for the majority of the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, life was simple... single celled life that sometimes organized into colonies. For 3.5 Billion years that is all that life did. Be Boring. Then something changed. What?
The Cambrian Explosion, around 530 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion).
But why the sudden explosion and diversification of life? Was there something to it? I posit that there was something holding it back. The Zombie Plague. Walk the dog with me here and I'll explain. (Bear with me, I might get a bit disjointed as I jump around and start getting into conjecture.)
Throughout the history of the Earth there have been Extinction Level Events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction). The chart at that link shows the pattern of ELE since the Cambrian explosion, but what is to say that they weren't happening before then too? They probably were, we just have no fossil record of them.
From the Bacteria Page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria):
The ancestors of modern bacteria were single-celled microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago. For about 3 billion years, all organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life.
Despite the simplicity of the life present, I'm sure it was diverse, but not homogeneous. It is likely that certain species of bacteria were specific to certain biomes then, as they are now.
I further conjecture that the "Zombie" Plague is a bacteria, or a bacteria like organism and an Extremophile. As we know it is hostile to other forms of life... Keeping other forms of life "in check," periodically killing off life in ELE's as their proliferation ebbed and flowed with time. Therefore it was at some point removed from the Earth's surface in order to allow the Cambrian Explosion to occur.
How would this be possible without its eradication? I have previously mentioned Sequestration, and I think I have figured out how.
The Farallon Tectonic Plate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Plate) has suggest to me how it might be possible.
The Farallon plate was one of the many tectonic plates that were present when Pangaea broke up during the Jurassic. I say was, because it is gone. The Pacific plate pushed it into North America and it subducted. The funny thing is that it is still kinda there, breaking up as it floats about in the Mantle under North America. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farallon_Plate.jpg).
I therefor suggest that the biome that the "Zombie Plague Bacteria" was present in was on a plate that subducted "shortly" before the Cambrian Explosion. The sequestration of the plague allowed the explosion to take place. That plate broke up into large chunks and through the process of Mantle Convection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_convection), those chunks spread across the globe, under the surface of the tectonic plates, carrying with them pockets of viable ZPB Extremophiles. There, for over a half a Billion years, the E-ZPB waited just below the surface. At vents, mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes and fault lines, this debris accumulated until it was somehow released, releasing E-ZPB back into the world.
I will admit though, one of the main places this theory falls down is how/why was the release nearly simultaneous at the global level?
As an interesting aside, I mentioned that Earth could have been a source for Panspermia... It has been suggested that the Zombie Plague killed the dinosaurs. The current belief is that the Chicxulub Crater Impact 65 million Y/O was what did them in with the K-Pg extinction event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93T_boundary)... However, there is some preliminary evidence that something was already killing them off. Some sort of disease. Also, there is increasing evidence that the ELE wasn't caused by a singular event, that it was the culmination of multiple impacts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93T_boundary#Multiple_impact_event). One or more of these may have been ejecta from an Hadean/Archean impact and brought E-ZPB back to Earth or released it from below the surface...
(Alright, I'm done. I'm going cross-eyed and getting a headache still looking at this.)
Alright everyone, I have been going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole off and on for the past week or so and spent the better part of the day today putting this together and I think I've nailed it. A decent theory of the underlying cause and how it worked.
2400
Hold on to your hats everyone, I'm about to get overly sciency up in here!
The only good way for me to get this out of my head effectively is to do so chronologically and start from the beginning. So lets get started.
Hadean Eon: 4567.17 - 4000 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean) which was followed by the
Archean Eon: 4000 - 2500 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archean) and the period of
Late Heavy Bombardment (Late Heavy Bombardment) that straddled the end of the Hadean and the beginning of the Archean
(When I said beginning, I wasn't BS'ing. Here's a more comprehensive timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timetable_of_the_Precambrian).)
From the Hadean article, which echoes pretty much everything I had previously learned about the formation of the earth:
It is unlikely that life could have formed and established itself in the extreme, volatile conditions of the Hadean. If life had begun to form at this time, it most likely would have been destroyed several times, being forced to start over again. It is probable, however, that the building blocks necessary for life as humans know it were formed at some point during this time. Life would be granted a true start in the succeeding Archean Eon, after conditions on Earth began to stabilize.
No sense in retyping it, I'll quote it instead. It says everything I wanted to. However, one theoretical vector worth mentioning is Panspermia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) with Extremophiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile). Bombardment might have brought life to Earth on stellar debris or, Earth might have been a source of life in that the bombardment might have taken Hadean or Archean Proto-life with it on ejecta thrown into space... (I'll be coming back to that later.)
After the Archean Eon was the
Proterozoic Eon: 2500 - 541 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proterozoic) (That end date range will be important soon.)
Now, this is a a bit of an oversimplification, but for the majority of the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, life was simple... single celled life that sometimes organized into colonies. For 3.5 Billion years that is all that life did. Be Boring. Then something changed. What?
The Cambrian Explosion, around 530 million years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion).
But why the sudden explosion and diversification of life? Was there something to it? I posit that there was something holding it back. The Zombie Plague. Walk the dog with me here and I'll explain. (Bear with me, I might get a bit disjointed as I jump around and start getting into conjecture.)
Throughout the history of the Earth there have been Extinction Level Events (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction). The chart at that link shows the pattern of ELE since the Cambrian explosion, but what is to say that they weren't happening before then too? They probably were, we just have no fossil record of them.
From the Bacteria Page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria):
The ancestors of modern bacteria were single-celled microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago. For about 3 billion years, all organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life.
Despite the simplicity of the life present, I'm sure it was diverse, but not homogeneous. It is likely that certain species of bacteria were specific to certain biomes then, as they are now.
I further conjecture that the "Zombie" Plague is a bacteria, or a bacteria like organism and an Extremophile. As we know it is hostile to other forms of life... Keeping other forms of life "in check," periodically killing off life in ELE's as their proliferation ebbed and flowed with time. Therefore it was at some point removed from the Earth's surface in order to allow the Cambrian Explosion to occur.
How would this be possible without its eradication? I have previously mentioned Sequestration, and I think I have figured out how.
The Farallon Tectonic Plate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Plate) has suggest to me how it might be possible.
The Farallon plate was one of the many tectonic plates that were present when Pangaea broke up during the Jurassic. I say was, because it is gone. The Pacific plate pushed it into North America and it subducted. The funny thing is that it is still kinda there, breaking up as it floats about in the Mantle under North America. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Farallon_Plate.jpg).
I therefor suggest that the biome that the "Zombie Plague Bacteria" was present in was on a plate that subducted "shortly" before the Cambrian Explosion. The sequestration of the plague allowed the explosion to take place. That plate broke up into large chunks and through the process of Mantle Convection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_convection), those chunks spread across the globe, under the surface of the tectonic plates, carrying with them pockets of viable ZPB Extremophiles. There, for over a half a Billion years, the E-ZPB waited just below the surface. At vents, mid-ocean ridges, volcanoes and fault lines, this debris accumulated until it was somehow released, releasing E-ZPB back into the world.
I will admit though, one of the main places this theory falls down is how/why was the release nearly simultaneous at the global level?
As an interesting aside, I mentioned that Earth could have been a source for Panspermia... It has been suggested that the Zombie Plague killed the dinosaurs. The current belief is that the Chicxulub Crater Impact 65 million Y/O was what did them in with the K-Pg extinction event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93T_boundary)... However, there is some preliminary evidence that something was already killing them off. Some sort of disease. Also, there is increasing evidence that the ELE wasn't caused by a singular event, that it was the culmination of multiple impacts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93T_boundary#Multiple_impact_event). One or more of these may have been ejecta from an Hadean/Archean impact and brought E-ZPB back to Earth or released it from below the surface...
(Alright, I'm done. I'm going cross-eyed and getting a headache still looking at this.)