Our early atmosphere was quite anoxic
‘till early algae terraformed the Earth.
One grand event, replacing gasses toxic?
Or did O oscillate since life’s first birth?
Did evolution make fate manifest?
Inexorable progress of the gene?
Or was the early oxygen repressed?
Methanogenic dominance was seen.
These visions of our past yearn to be fact.
Hypotheses distinct yet plausible.
The dawn of life’s mysterious, abstract,
Lest ancient rocks reveal what’s causable.
Archean soil lets
us know the way.
Oxygen came, but
then it went away.
Which gas is toxic? Check your point of view.
ReplyDeleteFor us, it's methane; we can't breathe the stuff.
For anaerobes, oxygen's toxic brew;
They die before we start to get enough.
From our perspective, it was lucky chance;
Our forbears learned to breathe the searing gas.
Yet trillions perished in that grisly dance,
A barrier their species couldn't pass.
We think that we are evolution's top,
But really we're one step along the way.
The course of life leads through, it doesn't stop;
New critters, hence, will smirk at our decay.
To see what it was like, here's what I mean:
What if some microbe learned to fix chlorine?