#106 The Story Of How CO₂ Created ALL Life, Intelligence and Consciousness

The more you learn about the history of Earth and the history of life, you find that at the center of it, there is, for some reason, it's rooted through this thing, CO2, that I think a lot of people just hear about sort of described in the news as this industrial pollutant that comes out of smokestacks.

But in the geosciences, there's sort of this much broader context for it where, I mean, it kind of has a couple amazing features, one of which is that You might have heard that we're carbon-based life, but the source of that carbon is CO2.

So it's literally the substrate of all life on Earth.

And then it has this other amazing feature that it, for the most part, maintains a habitable world for living things to live in through its... cycling through the oceans and atmosphere and through rocks, it maintains a habitable temperature for the planet, except for brief chaotic times in Earth history that we can get into where when it goes out of control, it can also kill most things on the planet.

So I think I wanted to step back from the headlines and like reintroduce this thing that people had heard about as like cosmically important to this planet.

Yeah.

What do you think most people get wrong about carbon dioxide? You mentioned there that most average listeners' exposure to that gas is probably some alarmist CNN segment where they're talking about how it's going to cause global warming, it's going to cause all of these issues in the world.

But what do people most get wrong about it?

I think it's sort of... hearing about it in that context and thinking about it, you know, we had CFCs that destroyed the ozone layer and, or, you know, diminished it.

And then we made some regulations and that's healed a little bit.

And we've had, you know, you have methyl mercury emissions, and this is just another one of those sort of environmental pollutants.

Um, And it really, I think you can't really appreciate how radical sort of the experiment running on the planet is today, unless you sort of appreciate this thing's fundamental role and how it works.

So, um, I think.

The reason why it's concerning what we're doing on the planet today is because this stuff is so important to how the planet normally operates.

It makes the planet Earth, like I argue, the way it behaves on this planet.

So we can get into that, but I think that's sort of the misunderstood thing, that this is not just another industrial byproduct.

This really is at the center of the story of life on Earth.

Right.

Yeah, let's go to the very start of that story.

What was the role in carbon dioxide in the origin of life? Paint that picture for us.

Like, where are we? What does the world look like? What is carbon dioxide doing exactly?

Yeah, so life probably started around 4 billion years ago.

The oldest fossils are, I think, like 3.6 or 3.8, but it probably started before then in the Hadean eon.

The Hadean is so long ago that there's basically no rocks left over at all from the Hadean eon.

The planet has been reworked by tectonics and just 4 billion years of planetary evolution since then that basically there's no fossil record at all of life in the Hadean.