Chapter 4
AND IN THIS CORNER… LIVE!
We saw earlier that life as we know it on our planet, began with and in the water. Water has a key role in our kind of existence. Consider that we humans are composed of seventy percent of that element; we could almost say that we are sea animals adapted to the surface.
Well, we must place ourselves there and think that, the planet is cooling, the water remains liquid longer, and it is accumulating in the lowest places by simple gravity simultaneously.
This initial ocean, it seems, was just one and so were the lands -as continents.
Science calls today that super-continent Vaalbara-Pangaea [7].
7 - Pangaea (Vaalbara-Pangaea): from the Greek prefix "pan" meaning "all" and the Greek word "gea", "soil" or "earth". Thus, it would be a word that means "the whole earth."
Pangaea is the result of the evolution of the first continent Vaalbara, which was probably formed about 4 billion years ago. Pangaea splits some 208 million years ago into Laurasia and Gondwana. At present fragments of this ancient continent are part of Africa, Australia, India and Madagascar.
Chronology
Minor or partial supercontinents:
-Nena (supercontinent, it emerges about 1,8 billion years).
-Atlantica (supercontinent, it emerges about 1,8 billion years).
-Gondwana (it emerges about 200 million years ago).
-Laurasia (Along with Gondwana, Laurasia emerged about 200 million years ago).
-Eurasia (the supercontinent Eurasia is now made up of Europe and Asia).
Major supercontinents:
-Vaalbara (it emerges about 4 billion years ago).
-Ur (supercontinent, it emerges about 3 billion years ago).
-Kenorland (it emerges about 2,5 billion years ago).
-Columbia (supercontinent, it emerges about 1,8 billion years ago).
-Rodinia (it emerges about 1,1 billion years ago).
-Pannotia (it emerges about 600 million years ago).
-Pangaea (it emerges about 300 million years ago).
Pangaea does not remain as the only continent but gets fractured and its segments drift, sail so to speak on the molten lava beneath the crust and lead to the continents we know today.
Let´s tell now tell a racconto and put all these facts in perspective.
Note that life, to evolve, develops first in the sea and then migrates to the land, while the supercontinent Pangaea-Vaalbara breaks and moves across the globe to fill the places we find familiar today.
At sea, where life generated animals, plants were also created, which moved inland and became land-dwelling vegetation, trees, grass, etc. ..
Some of the marine animals that had "come out" to land, while evolving, returned to the sea where they continued their evolution-e.g. cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.).
Other primeval animals became used to living on the surface and resulted in the famous dinosaurs, who reigned on the planet for about one hundred and sixty million years.
I do not want to overwhelm or drown you with the history of our world -many of you are certainly aware of it- but it is important we refresh what we know and try to notice certain "details" that are essential clues for understanding the topic at hand.
Let continue, (with a small remark).
Dinosaurs emerge about two hundred and thirty million years ago and disappear -go extinct- about sixty five million years approximately.
Considering that the human species, the first Homo, appears only in the last two million years, we understand that dinosaurs and humans never coexisted.
From the last dinosaur to the first Homo there was a sixty million years lapse, enough to not have ever encountered one another.
At this point I would like to focus your attention on some details of the evolution of life that will be important when we discuss the Genesis.
Interestingly, some dinosaurs could fly –like the Pterosaur-, and may have had their habitats on the beach. Consider that these animals had wings like bats and they were unfit to taxi like a plane or a duck, but they needed to jump from a high area, a high ridge to start the flight; and for that, what better than a cliff above the sea? Some of them were very large animals with a 12 meters wingspan, almost like a small plane.
It is also very important to emphasize that humans have been the last to appear in this story, the story of evolution.
Right. As you may have noticed it took about six billion years for the Solar System to form and man appeared in the last two million years.
It is common practice to compare these six billion years with one year of three hundred sixty-five days, in which the nebula begins to collapse the first of January and the human species makes its appearance at 23:00, December 31.
Mankind has his moment at the end, at the very end of the whole process.
I think this brief racconto of the history of the Earth gives us a sufficient and necessary basis of information to perform our comparison, so let's try!
નેક્સટ...
Chapter 5
Behold… GENESIS [8]
8 - Genesis. The Greek name comes from the contents of the book: the origin of the world, mankind and the Jewish people, the genealogy of all mankind from the beginning of time. Also "Genesis" has the sense of "prologue" as Jewish history properly begins with the Exodus, which Genesis is merely a prelude. This title appears in the Septuagint or Greek Septuagint (LXX). In Hebrew, the book is called "Bere?šyt": "In the Beginning, from the first word in the opening sentence. The text used for analysis belongs to The Jerusalem Bible, Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1973.
«In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that light was good, and God divided light from darkness. God called light “day”, and darkness he called “night”. Evening came and morning came: the first day. »(Genesis 1:1-5).
Let´s observe carefully what this first paragraph tells us.
In this description, I clearly distinguish the original chaos nebula of cosmic dust that science mentions. A "sea" of dust, for someone who may be watching in in the darkness, and who does not have the slightest idea that what he is witnessing is not water but a nebula in which he (our possible observer) is "floating". This individual is in the place, in the exact place, in which hundreds of millions of years later the Earth in formation will be located. Moreover, as he is not yet on solid ground all he can discern or understand, according to its parameters, is the abyss, the abyss of space...
