Excerpt: REWRITING EARTH'S CREATION STORY, by The Atlantic
- Rebecca Boyle
- Oct 26, 2016
- 1 min read
Humanity’s trips to the moon revolutionized our view of this planet. As seen from another celestial body, Earth seemed more fragile and more precious; the iconic Apollo 8 image of Earth rising above the lunar surface
helped launch the
modern environmental movement. The moon landings made people want to take charge of Earth’s future. They also changed
our view of its past.
Earth is constantly remaking itself, and over the eons it has systematically erased its origin story, subsuming and cannibalizing its earliest rocks. Much of what we think we know about the earliest days of Earth therefore comes from the geologically inactive moon, which scientists use like a time capsule.
We as a scientific community created an origin myth that has no more intellectual value than 1 Genesis,” Harrison says. “Although we’re very quick to criticize those that operate on faith, that’s exactly what we did.”
Ever since Apollo astronauts toted chunks of the moon back home, the story has sounded something like this: After coalescing from grains of dust that swirled around the newly ignited sun, the still-cooling Earth would have been covered in seas of magma, punctured by inky volcanoes spewing sulfur and liquid rock. The young planet was showered in asteroids and larger structures called planetisimals, one of which sheared off a portion of Earth and formed the moon. Just as things were finally settling down, about a half-billion years after the solar system formed, the Earth and moon were again bombarded by asteroids whose onslaught might have liquefied the young planet—and sterilized it.
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