For the past few months or so, we’ve been catching up on old episodes of The Big Bang Theory. After all those episodes, though, we realized that we hadn’t really figured out the lyrics to the theme song. So we looked them up:
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!
-Bare Naked Ladies
This led to the question: What is an autotroph, anyway?
So we looked it up. Amazing! Autotrophs, as it turns out, are what keeps carbon excess from accumulating within a closed ecosystem (like earth). In our present situation, they’re probably the salvation of the planet.
The most common autotrophs are plants. It’s why deforestation is accelerating climate change. It’s why the rate of algae growth in the oceans is accelerating (the earth’s natural response to keep up with all the extra carbon we’re pumping into the system).
With all the extra carbon, the autotrophs must increase and the heterotrophs (organisms that release carbon into the system) must decrease. It stands to reason that we’re inducing a new climactic age. Call it autotrophia. In such an age, there will be more algae and fewer fish. More bacteria and fewer animals – and quite likely as species down the food chain die out, fewer humans, too.
Just something to think about. 7 billion people and counting, as it turns out, is probably not sustainable.
