3,500 million years ago, the world changed and ceased to be anaerobic (no oxygen use). This process was due to cyanobacterias, the inventors of photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria began to absorb hydrogen from water molecules and release their oxygen like garbage. As a result, over millions of years, the planet was oxidized (the examples are evident in the current iron mines).

Stromatolites in Shark Bay, Western Australia. In Shark Bay waters are too salty and therefore stromatolites from this area have been able to survive from the attacks of the animal species that, for instance, thanks to them inhabit planet Earth.

It is believed that this process began where the sea was shallow, creating a type of rocks full of bacteria called stromatolites (literally ” stone bed”). Today, in the Shark Bay (Western Australia) we can make a real leap back in time and see how the first living ecosystems on Earth were. The processes initiated by the stromatolites increased oxygen in the Earth atmosphere of 1% to 21%, starting a new phase in the life’s history. It took about 2,000 million years (50% of the Earth’s history), thanks to the fusion of two bacteria, to eukaryotic cells first appear. From that moment, all we know more or less how the history continues.

If we imagine the length of a football field as equivalent to approximately 3,500 million years from the onset of stromatolites until today, the history of human life on Earth does not occupy the width of the white line that delimitates the pitch. Indeed, the Stromatolites have been able to survive the ice ages, meteorite falls, and until today, the action of man in his natural habitat.

As we have explained in the web section of this blog, for technical we understand everything that man has created to achieve a different environment, to live differently to what nature offered. Precisely for this reason, we believe that the only way humans could reach similar levels of perpetuity to those of stromatolites is creating a sustainable technique, a sustainability that has to embrace the fields of economic, social and environmental. Indeed, if we want to survive as a species from future meteorites, climate changes, epidemics, etc., we need to create a technique that allows us to overcome all these obstacles. So far, however, should compel us to create an economic technique powering a sustainable and fair for the current population. The human being has the tools to do it, or at least to try. These tools are love and knowledge. The feedback of these two elements is the only sensible way to create long-term sustainability.

On the one hand, love as a kind of art as Erich Fromm defined, means to preserve our own integrity. Fromm asserted that <<the affirmation of life, happiness, freedom and growth, is rooted in their own capacity to love, it is care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. […] Love is the active concern for the life and growth of that love>>. Of course we can only protect what we do love and that is why is also quite obvious that we still have a long way to get to protect our environment, to love him really. If love, as an art, requires discipline, concentration and patience, modern life does not help us much to be worthy artists.

On the second hand, the man experiences knowledge as human activity. That means, each of us experience our own knowing act. Therefore, the expression of fundamental and vital of knowing cannot be reduced to a single definition. Bertrand Russell argues that <<knowledge is a feature that can be deployed in our reactions to our environment>>, so knowledge is a feature of the process that leads to the stimulation of the reaction. Therefore, as a synthesis of all the above, we understand knowledge as the process by which each individual chooses a means in order to achieve a goal. Humans do know as a sum of experiences and for this reason knowledge has nothing to do with information. Information can help us to know, but only the creation of new knowledge may generate new information. Indeed, the creation of new information is the basis of science: no discovery is the result of one man, but before that there have been many others who have made small steps in that direction.

All in all, we need to have faith in love, as part of the nature of man, and the evolution of knowledge that seeks sustainability. The future of our species is at stake.

Swimming with a whale shark in Ningaloo Coast, Western Australia. It is believed that the largest fish of the world inhabit the waters of the oceans for 400 million years. Homo sapiens sapiens treads the surface only about 200,000 years ago.