Our Photovoltaic Future: The Metabolic Revolutions of the Earth's History.

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Olivia Judson published a very interesting paper this March on "Nature Ecology & Evolution". It is a wonderful cavalcade along 4 billion years of the history of the Earth, seeing it in terms of five "metabolic revolutions." It is an approach that goes in parallel with a paper that I wrote last year on BERQ; even though I focussed on the future rather than on the past. But my paper was very much along the same lines, noting how some of some of the major discontinuities in the Earth's geological record are caused by metabolic changes. That is, the Earth's changes as the life inhabiting it "learns" how to exploit the potential gradients offered by the environment: geochemical energy at the very beginning and, later on, solar energy.

https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/our-photovoltaic-future-metabolic.html