Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the idea basically that society needs to be both progressive and conservative to function. The lessons of the past are often important and useful, but not all of them. We need to strike out and find new ways of being while retaining the best ideas of the past.
Under the most accepted theories, the planet Earth started of with a carbon dioxide atmosphere at a very high pressure. At that moment, life that metabolized oxygen as we know it today would immediately die, but anerobic life that metabolized carbon dioxide would do very well. At some point a few hundred million years down the line, with all kinds of microbial life metablolising carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen, the world absorbed that oxygen for a while. Iron became rust, oceans de-acidified, and overall that oxygen was used up. Eventually there was nowhere else for the oxygen to go and the atmosphere started becoming less CO2 and more oxygen. To the organisms that required CO2, this was a catastrophe. In fact, some scientists call this tipping point the "Oxygen catastrophe". It killed 95% of microbial life on the planet.
The fact is, you had 3 options: Become an oxygen metaboliser, become tolerant of oxygen and continue to metabolise carbon dioxide, or go extinct.
Imagine if there was an anthromorphic council of microbes at that point in time. There would no doubt be microbes yelling "We've always consumed CO2 and we never had to worry about O2 before, stop worrying we'll be here forever!" and there would be microbes yelling "We must all stop consuming CO2 forever or we're going to all die!", but the reality was somewhere in between. The oxygen metabolising microbes would come about, but without the CO2 metaolising microbes there would be no oxygen after a while and everyone would die out. There needed to be changes, but there also needed to be a balance between progress and conservatism or everything would fall apart.
This would not be the only time things had to change. There have been a number of mass extinction events throughout history, and each time the status quo was thrown out and new rules meant that some of the old ways of being needed to be re-examined.
Under the most accepted theories, the planet Earth started of with a carbon dioxide atmosphere at a very high pressure. At that moment, life that metabolized oxygen as we know it today would immediately die, but anerobic life that metabolized carbon dioxide would do very well. At some point a few hundred million years down the line, with all kinds of microbial life metablolising carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen, the world absorbed that oxygen for a while. Iron became rust, oceans de-acidified, and overall that oxygen was used up. Eventually there was nowhere else for the oxygen to go and the atmosphere started becoming less CO2 and more oxygen. To the organisms that required CO2, this was a catastrophe. In fact, some scientists call this tipping point the "Oxygen catastrophe". It killed 95% of microbial life on the planet.
The fact is, you had 3 options: Become an oxygen metaboliser, become tolerant of oxygen and continue to metabolise carbon dioxide, or go extinct.
Imagine if there was an anthromorphic council of microbes at that point in time. There would no doubt be microbes yelling "We've always consumed CO2 and we never had to worry about O2 before, stop worrying we'll be here forever!" and there would be microbes yelling "We must all stop consuming CO2 forever or we're going to all die!", but the reality was somewhere in between. The oxygen metabolising microbes would come about, but without the CO2 metaolising microbes there would be no oxygen after a while and everyone would die out. There needed to be changes, but there also needed to be a balance between progress and conservatism or everything would fall apart.
This would not be the only time things had to change. There have been a number of mass extinction events throughout history, and each time the status quo was thrown out and new rules meant that some of the old ways of being needed to be re-examined.
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