{"id":90675,"date":"2019-05-13T15:03:28","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T22:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/how-cyanobacteria-could-help-save-the-planet"},"modified":"2019-05-13T15:03:28","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T22:03:28","slug":"how-cyanobacteria-could-help-save-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/how-cyanobacteria-could-help-save-the-planet","title":{"rendered":"How Cyanobacteria Could Help Save the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-cyanobacteria-could-help-save-the-planet2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s very easy to forget that complex life on Earth almost missed the boat entirely. As the Sun\u2019s luminosity gradually increases, <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/the-sun-wont-die-for-5-billion-years-so-why-do-humans-have-only-1-billion-years-left-on-earth-37379\">the oceans will boil away<\/a>, and the planet will no longer be in the habitable zone for life as we know it. Okay, we likely have a billion years before this happens\u2014by which point our species will probably have destroyed itself or moved away from Earth\u2014but Earth itself is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/how-science-figured-out-the-age-of-the-earth\/\">4.5 billion years old<\/a> or so, and eukaryotic life only started to diversify 800 million or so years ago, at the end of the \u201cboring billion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other words, life seems to have arisen around four billion years ago, shortly after Earth formed, but then a few billion years passed before anything complex evolved. Another few hundred million years of bacteria, algae, and microbes sliding around in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg22229672-900-why-did-evolution-stall-during-the-boring-billion\/\">anoxic sludge<\/a> of the boring billion, and intelligent life might never have evolved at all.<\/p>\n<p>Unraveling the geologic mysteries of the boring billion, and why it ended when it did, is a complex scientific question. Different parts of the earth system, including plate tectonics, the atmosphere, and the biosphere of simple lichens and cyanobacteria interacted to eventually produce the conditions for life to diversify, flourish, and grow more complex. But it is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/nature13068\">generally accepted<\/a> that simple cyanobacteria (single-celled organisms that can produce oxygen through photosynthesis) were key players in providing Earth\u2019s atmosphere and oceans with oxygen, which then allowed complex life to flourish.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2018\/06\/04\/how-cyanobacteria-could-help-save-the-planet\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\">Read more<\/div>\n<p><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s very easy to forget that complex life on Earth almost missed the boat entirely. As the Sun\u2019s luminosity gradually increases, the oceans will boil away, and the planet will no longer be in the habitable zone for life as we know it. Okay, we likely have a billion years before this happens\u2014by which point [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}