Astronomers tell us we only have a billion years left before a senescent sun burns us out of here. This is a haha at a facebook timescale, but in the big picture it means that life on earth is very late middle aged in human terms.
We feel a deep kinship with all the life that has passed before, from human ancestors to the first shrewlike mammals that inherited the earth from the dinosaurs, to the first fish to venture on to land, and all the way back to the first organic molecules that replicated. We use “we” in the big sense to include all life that has come before and what will follow.
We are curious. If cold, salty ocean water that was beginning it’s descent to the abyssal plain when the Vikings were sacking England is resurfacing today, with upwelling that alternates between the eastern and western pacific every thirty years in the PDO (Pacific Decadal Ocillation), and more frequently but less regularly in the ENSO (El Nino Southern Ocillation), what would have been going on for most of earth history when there was a panthalassic ocean and the continents were smaller and more clustered than they are today?
geosciencebigpicture 
