Peter Brannen: 'Deep Time, Mass Extinctions, and Today' | The Great Simplification #103

On this episode, Nate is joined by Peter Brannen, science journalist and author specializing in Earth’s prior mass extinctions, to unpack our planet’s geologic history and what it can tell us about our current climate situation. Humans have become very good at uncovering the history of our planetary home - revealing distinct periods during billions of years of deep time that have disturbing similarities to our own present time. How is the carbon cycle the foundation of our biosphere - and how have changes to it in the past impacted life’s ability to thrive? On the scales of geologic time, how do humans compare to the other species who have inhabited this planet - 99% of which have gone extinct - and will we end up being just a blip in the fossil record? How can an understanding of geologic and climate science prepare us for the environmental challenges we’ll face in the coming decades?

About Peter Brannen:

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, Aeon, The Boston Globe, Slate and The Guardian among other publications. His 2017 book, The Ends of the World covers the five major mass extinctions in Earth's history. Peter is currently a visiting scholar at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and an affiliate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He was formerly a 2018 Scripps Fellow at CU-Boulder, a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center at Duke University, and a 2011 Ocean Science Journalism Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, MA.

#thegreatsimplification #natehagens #climate #carbon

[treefrog]

This is another in a long list of brilliant, intelligible, and informative conversations that are so germane to the present moment. Personally I think that the Great Simplification should be an academic requirement for all high school students, politicians, seminarians, and prospective parents. The truth IS out there.

[waynebollman]

Wow. This guy is a master explainer of these things even though you can tell he might not think so because he comes across with so much humility and open-mindedness. I love'm. Definitely one of Nate's best guests ever. Thank you, Nate.

[Anyreck]

Hope every human older than 6 yrs gets to hear this discussion in full ASAP! Bravo Peter & Nate🙏

[OldJackWolf]

Having watched the changes during my 35 years as a soil scientist, I think the process is more advanced than what many other scientists have suggested. Furthermore, now that the impacts are accelerating in very dangerous ways, I suggest a episode or two on how individuals can learn to evaluate their risks so that they can mitigate them asap.

[PiaBros]

Thank you from an 81 year old Great Great grandmother. So informative and so easy to follow. Love all these podcasts …

[ramblingtothesun]

I watched it twice, the second time while thumbing through Peter Ward's "Under a Green Sky". Thanks for this Nate and Peter B!

[UnfollowYourDreams]

What a wonderful, intelligent and humble guest! Looking forward to the next interview with him!

[LittleOrla]

Information like this is gold. We hear so many different narratives, at least half of them fictional, that it becomes difficult to discern what's real. Thank you SO much for this podcast and this amazing guest. Pure gold. 💕🙏

[SeegerInstitute]

Awesome! The fact that life is nothing other than the second law of thermodynamics playing itself out in Aries of negative entropy. Love this guy.

[yokkaichi]

"There is some failing in our science communication..." 0:57:10 That is an understatement. There are so many lies on every side that it's impossible for anyone who doesn't make it their full time job to parse the noise to make sense out of it.

[mischevious]

As someone with a lifetime in horticulture and several years study in reforestation and regenerative systems I find Peter to be well versed in the geological and chemistry aspects of earth systems collapse, and spot on about the rate of change being the critical factor for survivability of species.

What he doesn’t appear to be aware of is that the threshold is already in the rear view. We’ve already passed dozens of climate tipping points, already entered a period of abrupt climate change. Annual crop yields are decreasing exponentially, every ecosystem on the planet *still living is already in a state of distress or collapse.
In fact we’re already losing ecosystems at an alarming rate. Because all the many interconnected interdependent species that make those systems functional are already going extinct- at an alarming rate.
What that amounts to, what all the educated studied minds humanity has to offer don’t seem to grasp(I believe because their time is spent staring at screens and hypothesizing instead of interacting with the natural living world, because modern humans no longer have a connection to the living world that affords us life) is very basic, very simple;
loss of habitat = loss of species,
loss of species = loss of habitat.

We can expound infinitely on all we’ve learned, identifying the problems and imagining the solutions.. all the while the super organism is bombing and bulldozing and polluting and gobbling up the last vestiges of human habitat- the living world.
Simple!:
We save life on Earth because life on Earth is in sum human habitat,
or we go extinct.
Right on the heels of every other species we ourselves depend on for life.

Of course we’re not going to do that, still too busy subjugating all other life so.. farewell my fair-weather friends!
May you at least find keen awareness of what your own life depends on before it ends.

[peterdollins]

Living 82 years seeing 97% of our insects destroyed 75% of our wild places 95% of our small birds 85% of our large birds and land animals and sea creatures is terrifying. I support 7 wild life/enviromental organisations Amnesty & the UK Labour Party. What else to do except go 97% vegetarian use only legs and public transport never fly never use excess energy?

[davehendricks]

Another great podcast. Thanks Nate and Peter!

[tedhoward]

Great discussion - thank you.

Around 45:10 Peter talks of heat dissipative structures like hurricanes and compares them to life. There is some power in that, but it seems to me to be far from an optimal view of life.

Around 1:35:00 Peter talks about working to unite disciplines, and at 1:38:00 about the bizarre series of accidents, and at 1:39:08 about how the society around us is constructed and at 1:40:00 about the importance of alkaline hydrothermal vents to the emergence of life.

One of the many bizarre accidents in my life was being in the first undergraduate class on the planet devoted to teaching the theory of plate tectonics (History and Structure of the Earth - at Waikato University in NZ) - when my primary interest was biochemistry and the emergence and structures and systems of life.

I now have a definition of life as: Systems capable of searching the space of possible systems for the survivable.

Viewing evolutionary history, geological history, through that systems lens; has allowed me to see a lot of things that are not normally seen.

So I agree with Peter that alkaline hydrothermal vents seem very probably to be a critical part of the emergence of life; but there is another critical part, that of PCR, which seems very probably to have been driven by temperature change delivered by massive tides (some 100m every 3 hours in that early time when the moon was much closer and the Earth was spinning much faster).

It also seems very probable to me that a collision large enough to make a moon is an essential part of initiating plate tectonics - given that we do not seem to see it on Mercury, Venus or Mars. So that seems to be a reasonably big filter - right there.

When you view life through that deep time lens, complexity is very slow to emerge. When you look deeply into why, then it becomes clear that it is new levels of cooperation that allow for the emergence and survival of complexity, and that competition tends to drive systems to local minima on the available complexity landscape. The idea that seems to dominate in economic and political circles - that competition is a good that promotes complexity - is wrong - it is a dangerous (potentially terminal) over simplification of something profoundly more complex.

Getting cooperation to survive, long term, requires effective mechanisms of cheat detection and mitigation.

Arguably cheating systems currently dominate most of our social institutions.

And this is a deeply complex subject, and the idea of life as Search for the survivable is deeply, recursively, important.

Search has a component that looks like freedom, the ability to go beyond the known.

Search also has to develop systems that tend to avoid self terminating vectors in that highly dimensional vector space.

Humans deliver a new level of search, beyond the mechanisms of replication with variation. We are exponentially faster and more powerful than any other life form; and our tendency to over simplify, is our greatest danger.

Under this definition of life, life is an eternally open system. The degrees of balance and equilibrium we see in it are required to degrees at each level, and at every level, life is eternally exploring conditions at and beyond those boundaries. That appears to be a fundamental part of what it is to be alive. It is not surprising that most over simplify it.

To me, there is one clear conceptual transformation that needs to happen within economic and political systems. They need to see the fundamental need for cooperation in diversity, or the human experiment self terminates.

Part of that is seeing the need for cooperation in diversity, as the only possible way to explore beyond the known with any degree of long-term security. And we need to explore beyond the known, to solve many of the issues we have, that have no solution in the known, and for other reasons.

Another part is seeing the need for cheat detection and mitigation systems at every level of complexity, as ongoing evolving ecosystems, and seeing any level of all out competition as instances of cheating.

A useful definition of cancer in our bodies is: any set of cells that stop cooperating and start selfishly using resources without appropriate regard to communication from the systems around them. That seems to go well, right up to the point that everything dies. We seem to be close to that. Economic and political cancers seem close to bringing human society to an end - and that is through a general over simplification of what is actually deeply complex, of necessity.

I have been one of those interdisciplinary autistic spectrum geeks for 60 years. It is all so clear and obvious to me, but so few people seem to be deeply interested in, or able to deal effectively, with the real complexity evidently present. Most seem to be trapped in the simplistic models that their subconscious systems assemble and deliver to their consciousness as experience, and don't appear to be interested in going beyond it.

[Igel-joxv]

Thanks Nate for your covering questions and Pete for your informative of the best overall.

[GlobeHackers]

This was a trip. I loved it. Deep time is so interesting. I have yet to read Peter Brannen's book. I will next week. It is great to live in a time with access to these stories. That's something to be thankful for, indeed.

[Heidi]

Great topic. More on deep time please.💐

[davidwalker]

Thanks for another great interview. Many interesting points and perspectives brought out.

[annethacker]

Thank you Nate and Peter! I too found it comforting in a strange way to hear that there were such massive changes in the nature of life on earth so many times before in the distant past... And that one of those massive changes was caused by trees?!! So I plan to read your last book Peter, and am looking forward to the next one. Nate, I feel like I should be paying you tuition, I learn so much from these podcasts. And you are bringing in experts that I would probably never come across by myself. If I somehow come in to some riches (right now my husband and I, in our late 60's, are living kind of month to month with a little cushion) those gains will be generously shared with you!!!

[glendasutardycempaka]

Brilliant interview - Peter just sold some books! Well done Nate - your show is amazing and you choose great guests! Thank you💕