Not all Spheres are created Equal

In the book The Next Hundred Years by Jonathan Weiner, the adverse effects of humanity interact - negatively - with the balance of Earth's natural order. Earth is a system of a few basic-working parts. According to the book's environmentalist and naturalist author, there are seven spheres of an inhabited planet, and they can be thought of (not only figuratively but also, to a surprising extent, literally) as seven spheres.

Earth: This is the round mass of minerals and metals, spinning, more or less solid mass that forms the majority of this "third rock from the sun," and it's surface. This is considered the lithosphere: lithos for stone, and sphere because these layers are a great shell enclosing the core.

Water: With a prospective of an astronaut, the planet's supply of water also forms a great round shell, or sphere, enclosing much of the lithosphere - sometimes called the hydrosphere. All the free flowing water of the world fills this sphere, and as has been proven with the discovery of the great underwater current, has its own cycle and flow; truly representing the blood of the Earth.

Air: The third is a hollow sphere. This is known as the atmosphere. Atmosphere spewed from the volcanoes as hot gases after the crust formed and the compounds which assist in the growth of life. Ever since that time, the planet has been wrapped in a thin loose shell of gases - though the mix of gases has changed greatly over time by the natural development of oxygen producing bacteria and carbon-dioxide providers.

Fire: All planets are bathed in the light of the star(s) they orbit. Our sun formed in space more than 4.5 billion years ago, and our planet is one of nine that coalesced on the sun's periphery. The sun is a great sphere of fire and it heats Earth's atmosphere and the hydrosphere, stirring up powerful currents in both. These currents bent and twisted by the spinning of the lithosphere into all the whorls of weather. This exterior energy is providing the abundant power to fuel the development and processes that created the cycles that fuel all life. All energy utilized in the systems of being can be traced to the energy provided by the local sun of a system, just as our Sun is a constant contributor to our ecological system.

Life: With ourselves being within "the box" (in this case point, "the sphere"), it takes an open mind to perceive that in shape, the whole of life is much like the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere: one of the concentric shells that are wrapped around the bull's-eye of the planet's core. Its existence surrounds the primary heart of the planet. The Swiss geologist Eduard Suess first called the sphere of life the “biosphere.” It could not survive without the others and is therefore, necessarily, younger than the other spheres. The biosphere is more than 3.5 billion years old according to 'scientific methods' of dating.

Ice: The planet at present has two big caps of ice, one at each pole. Some of the taller mountains are ice-capped, too. This ice forms yet another thin concentric shell, the cryosphere (cryo from the Greek for cold or frost). Of course, most of the globe is too warm for ice; but all of the scattered patches of ice on Earth do lie in the shape of a sphere. Though it might be considered a part of the hydrosphere, the cryosphere's behavior is so distinctive and influential it warrants its own position.

For all intended purposes, these spheres alone could contain the evidence of life, one celled amoebae, bacteria, and small organisms. However, what we consider to be true life and life by definition is in the presence of knowledge.

Mind: By far the youngest entrant on the list. Its point of origin is a small tribe of foragers in the African Savannah, a species called Homo habilis, which arose roughly 2 million years ago. This was a transitional species, as the evolutionary biologists E.O. Wilson and Charles J. Lumsden note:

"We can describe Homo habilis, without serious distortion, as the head of an intelligent ape riding on the body of a man."

The brain of Homo habilis (Latin for "Handyman") was significantly larger than that of other primates, and as the species evolved the brain grew at a steady rate, until our kind - Homo sapien sapiens, Man the Doubly Wise - appeared about 50,000 years ago. We are unremarkable because we can communicate mind to mind, to share knowledge from individual to individual and across generations. This sphere of power, which can affect all others, is known as the "noosphere," the sphere of the mind; but is only figurative.

It is this last sphere that has come to dominate the others. This relates to the story of Adam and Eve very easily in the fact that they are expelled from the garden for disobeying what was meant for their good. We where once in a type of homeostasis with the planet, but do to our desire we are no longer a part of the natural evolution of nature. As the planet grows and adapts to its travel and ecological progression through time, we progress as well adapting to our perceived level of comfort. Where a simple clay roof and hay floor would have done in the past, no longer is suitable for the whole of humanity. Where natural selection and evolution takes years even centuries, human technologies evolve in increments of months, even days.