Earth formed by the accretion of planetesimals. The process was violent. Rocky and metallic bodies of varying sizes, from sand grains to boulders bigger than a continent, banged into one another, breaking up, reforming, repeatedly colliding, and eventually accumulating into a planet. Gravity and chance played their roles in forming the planet. Accretion of planetesimals is the reason that you don’t really have to worry about a bolide impact. As the planets grew, their gravitational pull increased, and they swept their orbits relatively clean (but not completely clean). Before 3.8 billion years ago, Earth was under constant bombardment. Having swept its orbit relatively free of debris about that time, it then entered a more quiescent period, one interrupted by occasional large impact events, such as those that left craters like Vredefort (South Africa, 2 billion years old), Sudbury (Canada, 1.8 billion years old), and Chicxulub (Mexico, 66 million years old
You, too, seem to have formed by accretion. No, not of planetesimals, but of experience and idea. You might think that the process has been relatively smooth and peaceful, but in every instance, some new acquisition, say, of an idea, has resulted in some breakup of what was there and an eventual amalgam. Paradigm shifts in thinking occurred during and after big impacts. Think philosophical change. Have you always thought the way you now think?
Each planet’s impact history is different, just as your intellectual development differs from that of others. Geologists have been able to date the time of impacts that left their marks on the changing landscape of our planet. Can you date the impacts that have changed your ideas?
Are you in a quiescent period? Have your ideas remained unaffected for years or decades? Or, have you suffered through a large impact that has altered the way you think? Have several smaller impacts altered your way of thinking?
Yes, there are those whose lives will go uninterrupted by some external idea. They will live through a long period when everything makes sense, when everything fits into a unified explanation and an overriding metaphor for life’s meaning. Their orbits either by chance or by design are free of intellectual debris.
As for me, I’m a bit like the early Earth. I keep getting hit by new ideas that reshape my thinking, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Well, maybe the accretion of ideas is always for the better, maybe amalgam is what enables a person to survive the next impact. It’s not that I don’t trust the “solid ground” on which I now walk, it’s just that I know that at any moment some idea that I never encountered but that shadows my orbit will, most likely by chance, cross my path, do some breaking, and add its mass to the mass already accreted onto my life.
You, too, seem to have formed by accretion. No, not of planetesimals, but of experience and idea. You might think that the process has been relatively smooth and peaceful, but in every instance, some new acquisition, say, of an idea, has resulted in some breakup of what was there and an eventual amalgam. Paradigm shifts in thinking occurred during and after big impacts. Think philosophical change. Have you always thought the way you now think?
Each planet’s impact history is different, just as your intellectual development differs from that of others. Geologists have been able to date the time of impacts that left their marks on the changing landscape of our planet. Can you date the impacts that have changed your ideas?
Are you in a quiescent period? Have your ideas remained unaffected for years or decades? Or, have you suffered through a large impact that has altered the way you think? Have several smaller impacts altered your way of thinking?
Yes, there are those whose lives will go uninterrupted by some external idea. They will live through a long period when everything makes sense, when everything fits into a unified explanation and an overriding metaphor for life’s meaning. Their orbits either by chance or by design are free of intellectual debris.
As for me, I’m a bit like the early Earth. I keep getting hit by new ideas that reshape my thinking, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Well, maybe the accretion of ideas is always for the better, maybe amalgam is what enables a person to survive the next impact. It’s not that I don’t trust the “solid ground” on which I now walk, it’s just that I know that at any moment some idea that I never encountered but that shadows my orbit will, most likely by chance, cross my path, do some breaking, and add its mass to the mass already accreted onto my life.
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