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I think I have it guys; A good "Zombie" Plague origin theory.
(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.
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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.
(When I said beginning, I wasn't BS'ing. Here's a more comprehensive timeline.)
From the Hadean article, which echoes pretty much everything I had previously learned about the formation of the earth:
Quote:
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 with Extremophiles. 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
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?
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. 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:
Quote:
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 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..
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, 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... 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. 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.)
SPECIAL UPDATE: Recent news, relevant to this theory and similar ones.
Do you have a cup of coffee? Tea? Soda? No? I'll wait.
...
You're back? Alright, lets get started... I've been putting off this update long enough. Buckle up, this one is link heavy.
OK, one of the places that I get my science news is through the weekly Science & Skepticism podcast Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. I recently learned from them of several new developments that I'd like to mention here.
News Item #1:
From the "This Day in Skepticism" segment that starts the show, SGU Episode #414 featured the eruption of Lakagígar in Iceland. Not a "classic" volcano, it is a fissure and on June 8th, 1783 this fissure opened explosively with 130 craters. The eruption became less explosive after a few days and more Strombolian and eventually Hawaiian in character, but it continued until February 7th, 1784... Eight months.
During this time it released 3.4 cu mi (14 km3) of basaltic lava, 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide. By June 22, 1783 the cloud of gas had reached Le Havre France. In Iceland, it killed approximately half the livestock and between the famine and fluoride poisoning, 25% of Iceland's population died. Globally, due to the drastic change in the climate, it is estimated that six million died, making this eruption the second deadliest eruption known.
From the perspective of the WND story, this event can sort of explain the haze that is seen at ground zero... In fact, the hazy area in Inglewood is small by comparison.
News Item #2:
As featured in SGU Episode #415 as a Science or Fiction item, there is new evidence showing that there is a new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal. The long term geological implications for this are that over the next 220 million years, the Atlantic Ocean could close and North America gets pulled towards Europe.
This demonstrates how dynamic and changing our planet still is, even 4.5 Bn years after formation. Here's the article over at Science Daily.
News Item #3:
From the SGU Episode #419 News Segment: The Pandora virus, the largest virus ever discovered, both in mass and size of the genome. Is essentially a new form of life that may be worthy of a new domain. So far two have been discovered, the Pandoravirus dulcis and Pandoravirus salinus. These things are so large in fact, that at a size approaching one micrometer, they can be seen with a ordinary light microscope, rather than the electron microscopes that are usually used to look at viruses.
(Life on Earth currently falls under three Domains: Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryote. This level of discovery is entirely unprecedented.)
To compare, the genome of the virus Influenza A consists of 13,588 base pairs that code for eleven genes. Pd's genome consists of 2.47 million base pairs that code for 1500 genes and Ps's consists of 1.91 million base pairs coding for 2500 genes. (For further comparison, the Human genome is about 3 billion base pairs that codes for 20,000 genes.)
Here's the really interesting part: Through various genome projects around the world, geneticists have built up databases of the life they are studying. Through this it has been learned that many disparate creatures have some of the same genes, even when they are vastly different animals. In these new viruses, 93% of the genes have never been seen before and are completely unknown to any genetic data base.
These things are so large, that they had been previously overlooked. They had been previously discovered but were initially misidentified as bacteria. They weren't described until just last month. It is believed that "we" now know what to look for, it is likely that there are many more of these viruses to be discovered.
Articles HERE and HERE.
There is a lot more I would like to add to this line of thought, but the information I need escapes me... Things along the lines of ancient viral DNA getting incorporated into the non-coding segments in the DNA of extant life.
Alright, time to put my foil hat back on and go stare at pictures of tattoos.
