GR and M&D related: telluric forces

[Doug Millison]

I thought of  telluric forces, which Pynchon mentions several times in M&D,
and some important GR elements, as I read this passage in a New York Times
article, "Maybe We Are Alone in the Universe, After All " by William J.
Broad, published yesterday,
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020800sci-space-life.html.
The article discusses a recent book, _Rare Earth_, by Dr. Peter D. Ward of
the University of Washington, "a paleontologist who specializes in mass
extinctions" and Dr. Donald C. Brownlee of the University of Washington, "a
noted astronomer, member of the National Academy of  Sciences and chief
scientist of NASA's $166 million Stardust mission to capture
interplanetary and interstellar dust."

I haven't taken the notion any deeper, but the idea that these powerful
earth forces may contribute to life's evolution on earth seems to me to
bear thinking about in the context of M&D's telluric forces. From a
different point of view (looking at organics rather than the heavy metals
which center in the argument Ward and Brownlee make, according to Broad)
this represents an interesting notion when read in the context of the way
Pynchon treats the earth's interior in GR, the strata of petroleum.

Broad writes, "According to the book, the slow movement and recycling of
planetary crust into a planet's hot interior are key ingredients for the
evolution of complex life. Plate tectonics, the authors say, promotes
biodiversity by producing mountain chains and other kinds of environmental
complexity, lessens the odds of extinctions, helps keep planetary
temperatures even through the recycling of carbon and makes dry land on
which advanced civilizations can flourish."

Gravity plays a big role, too:

"The analysis of starlight from the fringes [of the galaxy] shows they are
relatively poor in elements like iron, magnesium and silicon, partly
because of less recycling of stellar materials over the eons and partly
because of the rarity in such regions of supernovas, the stellar blasts
that help make heavy elements in enormously hot explosions.  These
elements, Dr. Brownlee said, and even heavier ones that are radioactive and
also made in supernovas, appear to be prerequisites to the formation of
terrestrial-type planets that have sufficient gravity to retain seas and
atmospheres and that have plate tectonics, which is powered largely by the
heat of radioactive decay. "

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