Last unit, I told you that Chemistry was the most important science. The reason I said that was that so much of what we’ll see in this course—and what you’ll continue to see throughout science—is really just applied chemistry. The laws that govern the molecules of the universe apply whether we’re talking about test tubes, massive systems like planets and suns, or tiny systems like the cells in our bodies. So, you’ll see a lot of what you’ve learned again. Don’t forget it just because we’re zooming out a bit now.
Important as Chemistry may be, understanding Earth Science is an extremely important application of the ideas you’ve learned and others. In this unit, we’ll periodically zoom in to understand, but we’ll also zoom out massively to see, just what makes this planet so unique and special for life. Not to say that it’s the only planet that can or does support life, but it does look like our closest living neighbor, if we have one, is really far away. Understanding Earth’s uniqueness also teaches us humans some very important ideas about what venturing off into the big universe might look like and how we might continue to shape that big universe. We’ll also take a closer look at the field that allowed us to figure out the vast majority of what we know about our planet—geology—and from that knowledge start to understand some really big ideas that you’ll start to see again and again in science, like nature existing on a spectrum despite our best attempts to distill it down to modular categories, or change being the only real constant in the universe. We’ll see that, while there are many things about the planet, many pleasant and some less pleasant, that just happen, we can and do shape our world in immeasurable ways, and that means that we are in control of our future. And that, big and scary as it may seem sometimes, is the promise of a future that looks any way we want.
Important as Chemistry may be, understanding Earth Science is an extremely important application of the ideas you’ve learned and others. In this unit, we’ll periodically zoom in to understand, but we’ll also zoom out massively to see, just what makes this planet so unique and special for life. Not to say that it’s the only planet that can or does support life, but it does look like our closest living neighbor, if we have one, is really far away. Understanding Earth’s uniqueness also teaches us humans some very important ideas about what venturing off into the big universe might look like and how we might continue to shape that big universe. We’ll also take a closer look at the field that allowed us to figure out the vast majority of what we know about our planet—geology—and from that knowledge start to understand some really big ideas that you’ll start to see again and again in science, like nature existing on a spectrum despite our best attempts to distill it down to modular categories, or change being the only real constant in the universe. We’ll see that, while there are many things about the planet, many pleasant and some less pleasant, that just happen, we can and do shape our world in immeasurable ways, and that means that we are in control of our future. And that, big and scary as it may seem sometimes, is the promise of a future that looks any way we want.