Why We Burn

Penance for the Oxygen Holocaust

I ask, what other animals burn things?

Sure, there are some plants that benefit from forest fires, but they do not start fires themselves. Only humans burn things, and we do it every single day, without exception.

Now ask yourself what a single day without burning something or benefiting from a fire would look like. Raw diet from plants within walking distance, naked and homeless, cold and unstimulated. It is almost impossible for us to even conceive of, yet every single other form of life does it every day.

How can we be this slavish to fire? How do we, with all of our intelligence, not see a way without it? I may have the answer, but we will have to go back, way back, about 2.6 - 3 billion years ago.

At this time, the ocean was the planet. Life teemed, first around vents and volcanoes, then spilling into the wide open waters by learning the secret of photosynthesis. At first, photosynthesis used sulfur and other minerals, exhausting what were considered harmless particles for the time. The Earth was warm and wet. No land, no ice, no ozone.

Bacteria that still exists to this day thrived under these conditions. Single cell, non-nucleated individuals, reproducing asexually, and occasionally sharing genes laterally with their dying neighbors, as needed. A billion years passed this way. These organisms were essentially immortal.

Then, at some point, no one knows for sure why, a new bacteria developed with the power to photosynthesize with the three most abundant resources on the planet: light, water, and CO₂. By excluding a certain band of light, these bacteria could strip hydrogen from the H₂O and attach it to the carbon from CO₂ to make glucose. This band of light is the same green you see in every plant on the planet, and the bacteria is called cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae.

For another billion years, cyanobacteria thrived in a sunny ocean planet soaked in carbon dioxide. Nothing would stem its growth. It completely dominated the biosphere and polluted it with toxic waste: Oxygen.

Back then, there was no oxygen. Oxygen was poison. It suffocates, creates acid, fire, rust. Instead, there was methane and carbon dioxide. The sudden massive introduction of volatile oxygen nearly ended life on Earth.

Uncountable bacteria died. Over and over again. Populations on Earth crashed repeatedly over hundreds of thousands of years, until, finally, the blind race for constant growth crashed the entire planet. Yes, climate change. As oxygen escaped to the air and reacted with methane, it changed the atmosphere so significantly that a cascading negative feedback loop plunged the entire planet into an ice age that would last 100 million years. An incomprehensible 99% of all life on the planet died. This was the largest mass extinction in history, and the closest to total annihilation life on Earth has ever come.

The sheer weight of biomass that sunk to the ocean floor would only be discovered over two billion years later by yours truly, humans. Yes folks, the oil that we now dig up and burn compulsively is 95% made of the bodies of the victims of the oxygen holocaust.

Therein lies the answer. We know that we will burn all the oil, there is no question of that. We know that it will kill us. This makes perfect sense, since our mission as humans will have been fully realized. We will have set free the carbon trapped by the Great Oxygenation Event.

For you see, after that 100 millions years of ice age, something drastic happened. It only happened at that time, not before or since, and it changed everything about life: endosymbiosis.

First, oxygen tolerant bacteria, maybe parasitic of others, entered cells and used the increased reactive potential of oxygen to produce energy. So much so, that we now call it “the powerhouse of the cell”, mitochondria. Soon after, another important instance of endosymbiosis brought the originator of this climate catastrophe safe inside these brand new nucleated cells. Cyanobacteria entered certain cells, maybe as food but nobody knows, and also survived independently, using its own RNA to divide in syncronous harmony with the host cell, each losing some function to become eternally dependent on eachother for survival, despite maintaining their separate genetic heritage.

These organelles are now called chlorophyll, clustered inside chloroplasts to provide sugar to plants. Inside every single green leaf, inside every cell is this organelle, directly devolved from the earth-killer, cyanobacteria aka blue-green algae. It still exists freely in the ocean, of course. But another development after the Oxygen Holocaust and ice age was population control. Cyanobacteria now produces cyanotoxins, which get released under pristine growth conditions to control their own population.

That’s why algal blooms are so dangerous, this ancient root of life is trying to kill itself, and everything else is susceptible.

So why suicide? Is it cautious penance? Bacteria responsible for setting the world on fire trying to limit their own numbers so it doesn’t happen again? Hiding away in towers of emerald green, providing food for the new massive colonies of multicellular life?

They once flirted with communal living in stromatolites. Before eukaryotic life, before multicellular organisms, ancient archaea formed mineral towers, stacks of liquid life, carefully layered so the old anaerobic bacteria sat safe in the bottom, shielded by oxygen-tolerant bacteria, and topped with a slimy layer of algae. You can still see them today (pictured).

This early experiment anticipates the new age of specialized bacteria clumping together into organs; hearts, livers, brains, skin; working together to accomplish great tasks, impossible at single-cell size.

Given their apparent need for atonement, what greater task than to cleanse the air of oxygen and set the atmosphere back to its happy carbonated state?

The form of life we now enjoy has only existed for a few hundred million years. It is not the norm. We are a kind of extremophile ourselves, only able to tolerate a narrow band of temperature, humidity, discomfort, boredom. This narrow band of operation is the sharpened tip of the spear. Our directive is pointed and singular. Think about it.

Why this big brain? To get bored. Bored enough to find diversion in the licking flames of a campfire, clever enough to pursue more intricate plays of fire, weak enough to need the comfort of artificial heat, smart enough to dig deep underground and discover oil, and stupid enough to burn it.

We humans now dominate the planet, churning and burning it to fit our subconscious fancy, no one human in control, not even in control of themselves. Try it. Go a day without burning. We simply have no choice.

The food we eat all derives from cyanobacteria. Whether you eat plants or meat, your gut desire is to continuously infect yourself with the will of cyanobacteria. The anaerobic bacteria in our gut is like those ancient archaea that once dominated the planet, now walking around in giant human terrasuits, controlling our desires, forcing us to dig and burn and make the air clean once more. Methane, carbon dioxide, the original atmosphere is what they want to restore thru our actions.

We are merely machines designed to undo climate change. The first climate change. All our thoughts run analogous to this directive. We fantasize about doing the same thing with machines, a technological answer to our current climate crisis. But ours is merely a ripple off a distant shore compared to the orginal. They’ve had a long time to develop a technological solution, immortal beings that they are. Cyanobacteria exists unchanged in large numbers to this day. Evolution is a tool, not a random cascade.

We stare at the flame, we stare at screens, we love to burn more than anything else, we cook our food to feed our ancient masters, we make endless excuses to drive, to heat, to burn burn burn all the bodies that died 2 billion years ago. Would an AI driven robot sent to the stratosphere to sequester carbon ever think why it loves to do that?