451 I am not a scientist but I do a lot of research on why the planet entered into ice ages starting around 2.5 million years ago. in that process-----

     I started to understand just how important the changing atmosphere of the planet, due to the very life on the planet, was in forcing, all living carbon-based life need, to adapt to those changes. Mankind in all of our changes, is a very short-lived species, while we have been on this planet in a form that many of us would recognize as man, for between 1 and 2 million years! Our average lifespan is simply too short to begin to understand these necessary changes! Yet we have begun to understand how to make changes happen much quicker than would ordinarily occur! Look at our dogs, cattle, other livestock, and our plant food sources, we have been able to cause adaptation to occur in timeframes 100 times faster (or more) than nature ever would have. With our ability to "improve our pets" (but is a chihuahua really an improvement?) and food sources in only the last few thousand years, not by adaptation but by either selective breeding or gene modification we have come to understand just how quickly life can change. Mankind has seen these same conditions within what we term "race" which is simply breeding in a limited gene pool, caused by the lack of options due to either distance or water. (yes some of this was also brought about by social norms, preventing the intermixing of races, wars and conquest have also played a part in the mixing of races seldom at the benefit of the losing side!)

    What this all means is that life is programmed for the need for change as atmospheric conditions change the availability of certain gasses, along with corresponding environmental changes! This means that those species, that cannot adapt will simply die out! Yet we are not talking about changes that need to happen over a few hundred years or even a thousand years but over many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. These time frames are simply too large for mankind to be able to see happening. Fossil records are the only way to begin understanding such timeframes but the conditions, both for fossils to be made and the chances that we will find them in any reasonable order of the adaptational progression normally is only found in deep sedimentation layers in the past ocean or sea life. Land-based life forms are even harder to find in any long period of change. 

    What that leaves us with, is a tiny and incomplete view of how life has had to adapt to every slow change in both the density, and composition, of the atmosphere of the planet. 

     Do we have another thousand years to try and piece together our planet's past atmospheres by digging even faster and deeper? No that will not help! Techtonic plate movement as slow as it is, still remakes the surface of the planet every 200,000,000 years, so whatever was fossilized before that time frame is most likely changed or buried so deeply that finding a continuing record of pasted life is most unlikely! 

    This is where the other 7 planets come into play! Jupiter shows us what all 8 planets were like when they first formed! The gravity of Jupiter is strong enough (I believe) to have kept the vast majority of what it was first made up of to still be there! But it has been stratified by density, the atmosphere seems to be 90% hydrogen and 9% helium because the heavier gasses which by percentage are very little but they are there, have been forced deep down near the surface of the planet. Even the great storms that are on Jupiter cannot seemingly bring these heavy gasses up into the upper atmosphere where they can be suitably measured. Seemingly only around 1 % of the total atmosphere of Jupiter is gasses other than hydrogen and helium while in the universe as a whole 97.9% of it comprises hydrogen and helium, leaving only around 2.1% for everything else. The other three gas giant planets show around the same make-up of the upper atmosphere but there has not been as much research on those.

    We then head to Venus our sister planet that due to its much lighter gravity than the gas giants lost all of its lighter gasses of hydrogen and helium a long time ago but was left with an atmosphere 92 times as dense as Earth's present atmosphere, along with a 96% carbon dioxide make-up because it has never had abundant carbon-based life on it, which ended up sequestration the vast majority of Earth's atmosphere over the 3.5 billion years that Earth has had abundant carbon-based life. We then head to the Planet Mar's atmosphere which is only 1% of the Earth's atmosphere, due to its much smaller size and therefore it's much less gravity that simply could not keep much of its atmosphere from both floating off and being forced off by the "Sun's Solar Wind's", yet even at only 1% of Earth's atmosphere, it has more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere than our planet has! Over 23 times as much if it was the same size as the Earth but as it is only about 1/2 of the size of the Earth it has only around 12 times as much carbon dioxide in its tiny atmosphere as there is in the Much, Much, larger Earth's atmosphere!!!

    I am going to give you all a rundown of our planet's atmosphere from the time it was first created around 4.5 - 4.6 billion years ago to today's atmosphere.

                                                           The best guess of the Earth's atmosphere.

    When the gas and dust from the solar nebula finally came together to form the 8 planets in our solar system, they all would have had the same makeup of elements in the same proportions. This is because they all came from the same beginnings of an exploding star. they would have been around 73% hydrogen, 24% helium, and the other 3% everything else. Whenever material comes together due to gravitational forces, the heaviest elements are at the center and the lightest elements are on the outside. That means that the core of the planet would have been approximately the same size as it is now minus whatever material the planet has gained over the 4.5 billion years of cosmic dust that has fallen since then. yet the atmosphere would have been thousands of times larger than it is now, comprised of 73% hydrogen 24% helium, and less than 3% of all the other gasses that would have been present. Earth is not large enough to have developed the necessary gravity to keep the two lightest elements for very long, yet it would have taken a very long time to lose all of the gaseous forms of both hydrogen and helium because their own mass would have helped keep them in the atmosphere. Life it seems did not start right away but seems to have started around a billion years later, one of the main reasons for this was, that until carbon dioxide became common enough in the atmosphere that life had easy access to it, not because it increased in amounts but with the reduction of hydrogen and helium being lost to the surrounding space its concentration increased dramatically. Going from around .015% at many thousands of atmosphere to 96% and 92 times the atmosphere of present-day Earth. Such a change in concentrations allowed life to become abundant once started, most likely in the warm waters of a still very active Earth. We would have been unable to recognize, let alone live on this planet! No oxygen, not until life itself started changing the makeup of the atmosphere both by carbon sequestration and the production of oxygen as a waste by-product of photosynthesis, causing almost all life to adapt or go extinct to survive with this new addition to an ever-changing atmosphere! with the reduction of carbon dioxide both by its conversion to carbon and free oxygen and the almost unbelievable increase in the sequestration of the carbon by the death and burial of life especially in the seas and oceans of the planet. At the same time that carbon-based life started in abundance on the planet, the sun was slowly increasing the amount of how much energy it was sending to the Earth at a rate of around 40% over the 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence. The planet is believed to have gone through two long-term snowball Earth's events, due both to a weaker sun's energy output and lowering carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Both of these events are believed to have been reversed due to the planet having a much more active tectonic plate movement, allowing a high enough rate of sequestrated carbon to be returned back into the atmosphere via volcanic action. While there still is active plate tectonics inside the crust of the planet, it is not as active as it was 4 billion years ago, due to several things. The internal heat of the planet is caused both by pressure and the decay of radioactive material inside the outer molten core of the planet. As the decay of this radioactive material it gives off a massive amount of heat but it also changes the material itself into less and less radioactivity matter, allowing the planet to ever so slowly cool down. As this cooling process goes on, it affects, how active the plate tectonics of the planet is. Even a very small cooling over very large periods of time, has caused enough of a change in the planet's plate tectonic and the active volcanic system on the planet as well as earthquakes in both size and periods between them. On a scale relating to many individual lifetimes, that difference is of no concern, however, when you are talking about super-volcanic events and the period of time between them, scientists are finding that those periods seem to be increasing. 

    The speed at which the density of the planet's atmosphere has decreased as plant life has had to adapt to ever-lowering densities directly relates to both carbon sequestration and plate tectonics activity. Back 3 billion years ago the oceans of the planet were so filled with life that if somehow a person could survive the pressure of the atmosphere and lack of oxygen, they could have walked on the waters of the planet as if it was simply a giant green path. That is what truly "abundant plant life" would have looked like! People will tell you that there is abundant life even in the arid and semi-arid areas of the planet pointing out insects, reptiles, cacti, birds, rodents, and even mammals saying that the list is almost endless! Well, I guess if that is your baseline for abundant life, what can you say, while it can seem to be simply a matter of perspective, the truth is that what we think of as being abundant life, and truly having all of the necessary nutrients and available energy at hand for unlimited life in times so far back in time that trying to comprehend such timeframes is impossible. When we try and imitate past abundant plant life, with unlimited carbon dioxide, sunlight, nutrients, our limits start to become the plants themselves, that no longer have any gene ability to recreate what once was commonplace for life that had almost no limits, especially considering that there simply no need for plants to fight over limited nutrients. only as those nutrients started to become harder to get did life begin to create barriers that would protect areas from other plant life. But that could not happen with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as any plant that had access to the atmosphere had as much access as any other plant! 

    From 3.5 billion years to around 2.3 billion years ago life had almost no limits. But around this time oxygen started becoming common enough in the atmosphere that many of the plants that could not survive with these levels either had to adapt or go extinct. Yet there was still enough carbon dioxide and necessary nutrients to quickly fill any niche that had lost life to the new norm!  Then from 2.3 billion to 750 million life while changing, still did not have to fight much over either carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or nutrient availability! But about this time carbon dioxide had become low enough in the atmosphere that the planet started cooling down to the point that for the next 10 million years ice ruled the planet and plant life had to make giant changes in carbon dioxide that they needed to survive. With these changes in plant life, other newer forms of life could begin challenging for a place within these new parameters, but the balance that had lasted for 2.75 billion years was not yet in balance enough for carbon sequestration and plate tectonics to coexist so another ten million years of snowball Earth happened until enough carbon dioxide had been released both by plate tectonics and evaporation of the great waters of the planet where most of the free carbon dioxide was being stored. By this point around 640 million years ago, almost all plant life that required a large concentration of available carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been either replaced with plant life that survived on much lower levels or had adapted to that requirement. The age of the reptiles was in its earliest development. for the next, almost 600 million years life began adapting faster than it had ever had to in the past 3 billion years or so! There had been major extinction events over the lifetime of the planet, but perhaps the one that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, had the most profound effect on changing the path that the planet now was thrust upon. And in so doing started creating new ways of if not reversing then at least slowing down long and mid-term carbon sequestration. Animals like beavers started removing mid-term storage of carbon in trees, by both eating the trees and creating very large treeless areas for their own uses. Many other types of burrowing animals grew to such great numbers that they too kept a small percentage of tree life at bay by the size of their communities. When mankind entered the scene in great enough populations that living a nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers no longer could sustain the growing populations, agricultural and animal husbandry were started, which greatly increased the speed of the mid and short term carbon storage, by both the clearing of lands of trees and increasing the rate of decomposition of soil carbon. All of this lengthened the latest interglacial period from always around 10,000 years to now it is already between 12,000 and 13,500 years depending on where you considered the last ice age to have ended! In the beginning, mankind was un-intentionally, causing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to remain around 280 parts per million, but once mankind started using fossil fuels as a source of energy and using great amounts of limestone for the production of both cement and concrete, we started releasing enough carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere to overbalance the planet's temperature-regulating abilities, much of which had already been lost in the distant past by the need for the planet to create many more areas of arid and semi-arid on the planet, so that the newly release soil carbon of these areas could become available for use in places that still received plentiful rainfall! 

     So there you have it, what carbon dioxide and the massive amount that was in the atmosphere when life first took off 3.5 billion years ago and the tiny 800 gigatonnes that now reside in the atmosphere! The fact that the Earth has, up until just a few million years ago, maintain so much carbon-based life for so long. Is truly a "Magnificent Achievement"! Whether or not mankind was designed to become the only species that has the ability to extend all carbon-based life on the planet for as long as we can remain a viable species on the planet. Or we are simply a "lucky quirk of fate" to have come along "in the time frame of life on the planet" at just the last minute, to take upon ourselves those needs that "This Most Beautiful Planet" and the only place we can call home, has for extending life!

    While there truly is no end to the requirement that mankind faces now and into the future, many minds are better than one, yet we must resist trying to find ways to make more and more millionaires at the cost of hundreds of millions of the rest of us! Only one way towards the future is sustainable, all others are simply short-term solutions to long-term needs. How we go forwards in the near future, is perhaps not nearly as important as how we absolutely need to go forth in the long run! while we may think we understand what the planet and all carbon-based life are facing, the reality is that there is only one way to both stop Global Warming and Climate Change and repair the temperature-regulating-abilities of the planet and maintain carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for thousands of years to come!

    I try and make it as easy as possible for anyone to reach me, yet I seem to be failing on all fronts. Yet I must keep trying for there is no other option! I live in Nebraska in the USA. My phone number is 402-890-7946, I can also be reached at   daniel.kadavy212@gmail.com    or to read so much more any and everyone is invited to go to    https:lifecycleofaplanet.blogspot.com    Thank you but you must do more than just downloading and then leaving it at that, share, research, talk about that crazy guy in Nebraska to anyone who may listen. Dan