Time Odyssey

So here I am, watching a copy of The Blue Planet: Sea of Life, and I’m on disk 3 with the program on the seasonal seas. After having gone through the first 2 DVDs I’m starting to wonder whether life is contingent on circulatory systems. Here is where I’m going with this. The earth’s tilt is one of the driving forces behind the ocean currents. Sure there are other factors such as wind, temperature, salinity, etc – but when you boil a lot of these factors down it all comes back to the energy of the sun in one way or another.  But for the sun’s energy to reasonably cause temperature and wind effects, the earth axis needs to be tilted in some way that causes the sun’s energy to be distributed in a non-uniform fashion. Otherwise what we get is wind patterns and currents more reminiscent of Jupiter’s atmosphere which has a tilt of only 3 degrees.

What seems to be evident from this DVD series is that without these currents, the basic food sources in a specific area would quickly be consumed without opportunity to replenish. One of the implications is that early forms of life would have had a built in defense mechanism against other predatory organisms. It would be easy to imagine that with the very earliest forms of life such defense would have been surely a matter of dumb luck. However with each circuit around the ocean currents, specialization would occur through natural selection in which less migratory organisms would develop more aggressive, predatory tactics and the more highly migratory organisms (at least to begin with) would develop more defensive tactics.

Currently there is this big push on to see if life ever evolved on Mars. The essence of the theory is that where there is flowing water, there exists the possibility of life. My thought however is that it isn’t just flowing water that is a requirement. You need to show geological evidence of some type of circulatory system for water otherwise the processes of natural selection have no opportunity to influence the evolution of amino acids to single celled organisms to multi-celled organisms.

In the case of Mars while water does appear to exist, circulation doesn’t. So my thought is that the best we will ever hope to find is the precursors of life, but not actual life itself. For that, we might actually have a better chance of finding life on Titan. – K