From NASA
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope precisely measured the mass of the oldest known planet in our Milky Way galaxy. At an estimated age of 13 billion years, the planet is more than twice as old as Earth’s 4.5 billion years. It’s about as old as a planet can be. It formed around a young, sun-like star barely 1 billion years after our universe’s birth in the Big Bang.
Continue reading Oldest Known Planet IdentifiedAbout 4.5 billion years ago, the miscellaneous material orbiting a
star at the edge of the Milky Way coalesced into a planet that we call
Earth. It took another billion years—a thousand million years—before
it cooled enough for life’s self-replicating biochemical processes
would flourish in the primeval stew of the oceans. Another billion
years was required before multicellular organisms would evolve. Not
until about 500 million years ago did fungi and plants appear on the
land that had risen out of the oceans. Insects evolved in this
terrestrial ecology. Then 100 million years was required for some
marine animals to transition to the continents on their long and
convoluted journey from simplicity to complexity. Thus began the magic
of life and death that has alternated between the prolific and the
extinct throughout the subsequent eons of history. We, as a distinct
species, evolved as Homo sapiens only about 200,000 years ago.
The story of fossils left during the last glacial period is currently on display at the Cortes Island Museum. They are Buchia mussels, Belemnites, and Ammonites—creatures that lived in the Chilcotin region at the same time as the dinosaurs. The rocks containing their fossils were relatively undisturbed for nearly 130 million years. Then, during the last glaciation period, fragments broke off and were carried to Cortes, Read, Sonora, and other Discovery Islands.
In this morning’s interview, Christian Gronau, a retired geologist and Cortes Island resident, tells their story.
Continue reading At the Cortes Island Museum: Fossils Left by the Last Glacial AgeAs the course of history attests, civilizations tend to rise and then fall. This process poses two fundamental questions. What causes people
to coalesce into complex societies? And what causes them to fracture
into disorganized populations? Perhaps the most cogent and credible of current explanations to both their formation and collapse is in Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, a remarkably insightful 2025 book by Dr. Luke Kemp, a scholar from the Centre for Studies of Existential Risk at the Cambridge University.
Alpha Male – Photo by Art DiNo via Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)
Anthropology reveals interesting information about ourselves, particularly because of its ability to conduct an examination of our human behaviour and customs from the distance of different cultures and long periods of time. This provides anthropology with an illuminating perspective that is available to few other sciences. An illuminating example of this is provided by “The Enemy Within”, an article in the July 12, 2025, edition of New Scientist, written by Jonathan R. Goodman. (Also see his book, Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World.)
As a sociologist, Goodman explores the interface between anthropology, primatology, psychology and economics to explain the dynamic of inequality. This has become particularly worrisome in our present culture as the rich get richer, the powerful more influential, and everyone else is feeling justifiably victimized. Goodman begins by taking us back to our very historical beginning.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Invisible Enemies
