My series on evolution began last Sunday with THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION. But before I get into Humanity, some speculations on the future of the Iran War: I asked Google AI:
How long do you think the Iran War will last?- Not much of a response: The duration of the war will largely depend on the success of these targeted strikes, Iran's ability to resist, and the willingness of all sides to seek.
- Repeated what has been mentioned in the past:
- President Donald Trump expects the war to last 4 to 5 weeks.
- Israel thinks this will go on for months.
- Iran wants a slow, protracted war of attrition.
- In other words, who really knows how long the Iran War will last.
The weekend price of WTI crude oil is $99.30/barrel and Brent crude at $103.89/barrel. Google AI: what do you think the price of oil will be early this coming week and into the future?
- Bullish Pressure: Continued military activity near Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz is keeping supply restricted.
- Price Targets:
- Brent: Expected to trend toward $106+ if disruptions persist.
- WTI: Likely to test the $100 level again as traders re-enter long positions.
- Risk Factors: High volatility is expected at the Monday open; some analysts suggest a "higher-end scenario" where prices could test $120–$150 if the conflict escalates further this month.
Now in the third week of the war, there appears to be no significant well-organized Iranian sleeper cell activity in the USA, so the primary inconvenience now has to do with the world economy, affected by the price of petroleum. The stoppage of oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz is at the heart of this problem. When will oil tankers safely pass through?- President Trump, after insulting our allies with his tariffs and other nonsense is now demanding countries to assist with ship escorts in the Strait.
- Yes, all their economies are hurting, so they no doubt will come. But they are doing so with some reluctance, and countries like France, the UK, Japan, South Korea and China are now only considering sending ships. My guess is that they will, but it will take a week for a Japanese war ship to get to the Strait.
- Thus, nothing much will happen at least till the end of the March, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. That is more than 2 weeks away.
- Finally, my posting yesterday was just a prediction: THE USA WILL INVADE KHARG ISLAND.
- How likely is this happen? Well, In a 1988 interview, Trump indicated that if Iran tries to make us looking like a bunch of fools, I would go and and take Kharg Island.
- Here is Time magazine's view on this matter.
Now, on to my posting of this Sunday. As in the evolution of the universe, the creation and rise of humanity has a biblical story and a scientific one. First, the Google AI version of traditional religion:
- Special Creation (Genesis): The Book of Genesis, shared by Jews and Christians, tells that God created the world in six days. On the sixth day, God formed man (Adam) from the "dust of the ground" and breathed life into him. Eve was later formed from Adam's rib to be his companion.
- Cyclic Creation: Hinduism does not have one single creation story. It typically teaches that the universe is cyclically created, destroyed, and recreated over vast periods (kalpas). Interestingly enough, evolution is involved, from turtle to boar to a man-lion to human forms.
- Buddhism: Buddhism does not rely on a creator deity, and therefore, it does not hold a central religious story about the creation of humanity. It tends to focus on the interconnectedness of all life and the continuous cycle of life and death (samsara).
The Biblical version is that God created the universe roughly 6000 years ago. First, light on Day 1; the sky and dividing waters on Day 2; land and vegetation on Day 3; sun, moon and stars on Day 4; sea creatures and birds on Day 5; land animals and Humanity on Day 6; then he rested on Day 7. Sort of like me. I exercise from Monday through Saturday, and do nothing physical on Sunday.
To begin the scientific discussion, Google AI's version of how the universe was created is a scientific marvel of creativity and science:
- Began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. No sense of what was there before time zero.
- Note that this was not an explosion, as such.
- Rather, there came an expansion of space itself.
- The process created time, matter and energy.
- Yes, not much more evidence than God saying, Let there be light.
- As cooling began to occur, some energy was transformed into protons and neutrons, eventually forming hydrogen and helium.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed that galaxies were moving away from Planet Earth, suggesting that they all started from a single starting point.- Gravity then drew these molecules to form stars and galaxies.
- Our Milky Way Galaxy began to form around 13 billion year ago, less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe.
- Around 11 billion years ago, our Milky Way was struck by another galaxy.
- Our Sun formed around 4.6 billion years ago, and our solar system began to develop shortly after.
- Earth came 4.54 billion years ago, with liquid water only 200 million years later.
Evidence suggests that life first appeared at least 3.7 billion years ago, with some speculations indicating perhaps as long 4.28 billion years ago. These were self-replicating molecules.- The earliest life might have been biotic life in Canadian hydrothermal vents or Western Australia zircons. These ancestors are known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA.
- Clearer evidence traces to stromatolite fossils in Greenland graphite 3.7 billion years ago and Australia stromatolite fossils 3.5 billion years ago.
- The Great Oxygenation Event was triggered by photosynthesizing cyanobacteria 2.4 billion years ago.
Abiogenesis is the precise mechanism of how life first formed, that crucial transition from simple organic chemistry to self-replicating complex molecular systems.- Many scientist believe that life was created when phosphate groups, ribose sugar and nitrogenous bases randomly linked to form nucleotides, which then linked to form self-replicating RNA strands.
Where? Probably at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.- Similarly, the terrestrial option would be at volcanic hot springs or geysers, where wet-dry cycles could build complex molecules.
Another possibility was in the atmosphere. In 1952 the Miller-Urey experiment passed electrical sparks (or the equivalent of lightning) in a container of methane, ammonia and water vapor (early Earth atmosphere), and formed amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.- Recent (2026) abiogenesis experiments have made significant breakthroughs by demonstrating microlightning in water drops to create amino acids. Other researchers successfully linked amino acids to RNA. Watch this video.
Panspermia, or extraterrestrial seeding.- Comets or meteorites could have delivered complex molecules to Earth.
- Then, of course, there are some who subscribe to the extraterrestrial, or flying saucer, option.
- This line of reasoning is generally derided by the scientific community.
Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the 5th century BC, suggested so.- Svante Arrhenium (of Greenhouse Gas fame) first coined the term, panspermia.
- Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, suggested that life was deliberately seeded on Earth by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Just a thought. No evidence.
- Ronald Bracewell (1921-2007), Lewis Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, dabbled in this field.
- From 1959 to 1961, when I was a student there, he constructed a 32-dish radio telescope west of the main Stanford campus in 1961.
- Then, when I spent some time at the NASA Ames Research Center in the mid-1970s on a topic dealing with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, he was a guest speaker who suggested panspermia. I had longer follow-up discussions with him on this topic in subsequent years.
- Anyway, there is much we don't know about how life originally began. It will be some time into the future when scientists will actually develop a mechanism to create and nurture life.
- There is a consensus that the first life form was bacteria, emerging 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Soon came archaea. The three domains of life are these two and eukaryota.
We are eukaryotes, appearing anywhere from 1.6 to 2.3 billion years ago.- The first animal appeared in the ocean as long as 800 million years ago.
- Invertebrates first transitioned to land around 500 million years ago, and first vertebrates at least 370 years ago, with dinosaurs coming in the Triassic Period, as long as 245 million years ago.
- 75% of animal life died off 66 million years when an asteroid crashed into our planet and caused a global mass extinction.
The "easy" part of science is tracing evolution from 6 to 9 million years ago, when we began to spin off from chimpanzees and bonobos, initiating a phase of early hominids, for paleoanthropologists have found skeletal remains to speculate how this occurred.
- Homo sapiens, us, finally prevailed:
Tools were used maybe 2 million years ago, and fire at least a million years ago. So from 10,000 years ago, we developed farming, cities, came the pyramids of Egypt, Athenian Democracy, Jesus Christ, Industrial Revolution, Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the end of the Cold War and what we are today in 2026.
So here is the total evolution chart from bacteria to humans.
The future? To come.
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