In the Beginning Was… (the Word?)—A Geoscientific Excursus on Planet Earth Framed by Historical Statements of Poets and Thinkers about Spirit, Matter, Natural Laws, Chance, Work and Eternity

Abstract

That humankind has grappled with the origins of its existence since early times is evident in the Bronze Age creation story found in the Old Testament. Today, our understanding of the evolution of planet Earth and life on its surface is scientifically more robust, thanks in part to insights from the petroleum industry drawn from the geoscientific archives of Earth and its Moon. These insights include evidence of sea-level fluctuations, multi-cyclic deposits of sedimentary rocks, including those of petroleum source rocks, which have developed across all climate zones of the Earth, among other things, through algal blooms in the world’s oceans after the (periodic, perhaps cosmic?) input of fertilizing phosphorus, magmatic events (e.g. as volcanic hotspots) with accompanying thermal metamorphism of the lower crust and the occasionally delayed subsequent subsidence of oil- and gas-generating and accumulating sedimentary basins above, tectonic movements with generating subsurface structures and combined with earthquakes (e.g. the epochal earthquake and the subsequent tsunami in Lisbon in 1755), asteroid impacts, and dice game affine lognormal field size distributions of oil and gas in the subsurface as well as of other natural multiplicative systems on the Earth’s surface. The purely material development governed by natural laws and its likely dependence on astronomical conditions in the Milky Way certainly allows for the justified assumption that Earth, in its diversity, appears to be quite isolated in its galaxy. How this came about can be discussed primarily from a geoscientific perspective, starting with the New Testament statement “In the beginning was the Word,” and drawing on quotations from, among others, Goethe (“in the beginning was the deed”), Leibniz, Voltaire, Einstein, Jung, and Eigen (“the game and its rules are a natural phenomenon that has guided the course of the world from the very beginning”). At the beginning, and in the time that followed until today, there must have been a multipolar interplay of word (spirit), matter, natural laws, chance, and work (energy) around the planet Earth, transcending the bipolarity of spirit and matter. The developments of the Earth’s core and the Earth’s magnetic field, which offers protection against cosmic radiation, and the increase in catastrophic (periodic?) asteroid impacts documented in lunar rocks, coinciding with the beginning of the Phanerozoic (the eon of “visible life” since approximately 541 million years ago) with its high, unstable atmospheric oxygen levels produced and maintained by biota through photosynthesis, and formative geodynamic cycles encompassing climate history and influenced by lunar motions, testify to sensitive, previously unseen (random?) dependencies.