The Urantia Book
PAPER 58
LIFE ESTABLISHMENT ON URANTIA
Presented by a member of the Urantia Life Carrier Corps now
resident on the planet.
58:0.1 IN ALL Satania there are only sixty-one
worlds similar to Urantia, life-modification planets. The
majority of inhabited worlds are peopled in accordance with
established techniques; on such spheres the Life Carriers are
afforded little leeway in their plans for life implantation. But
about one world in ten is designated as a decimal planet and
assigned to the special registry of the Life Carriers; and on
such planets we are permitted to undertake certain life
experiments in an effort to modify or possibly improve the
standard universe types of living beings.
1. PHYSICAL-LIFE PREREQUISITES
58:1.1 600,000,000 years ago the commission of
Life Carriers sent out from Jerusem arrived on Urantia and began
the study of physical conditions preparatory to launching life
on world number 606 of the Satania system. This was to be our
six hundred and sixth experience with the initiation of the
Nebadon life patterns in Satania and our sixtieth opportunity to
make changes and institute modifications in the basic and
standard life designs of the local universe.
58:1.2 It should be made clear that Life
Carriers cannot initiate life until a sphere is ripe for the
inauguration of the evolutionary cycle. Neither can we provide
for a more rapid life development than can be supported and
accommodated by the physical progress of the planet.
58:1.3 The Satania Life Carriers had projected
a sodium chloride pattern of life; therefore no steps could be
taken toward planting it until the ocean waters had become
sufficiently briny. The Urantia type of protoplasm can function
only in a suitable salt solution. All ancestral life --
vegetable and animal -- evolved in a salt-solution habitat. And
even the more highly organized land animals could not continue
to live did not this same essential salt solution circulate
throughout their bodies in the blood stream which freely bathes,
literally submerses, every tiny living cell in this "briny
deep."
58:1.4 Your primitive ancestors freely
circulated about in the salty ocean; today, this same oceanlike
salty solution freely circulates about in your bodies, bathing
each individual cell with a chemical liquid in all essentials
comparable to the salt water which stimulated the first
protoplasmic reactions of the first living cells to function on
the planet.
58:1.5 But as this era opens, Urantia is in
every way evolving toward a state favorable for the support of
the initial forms of marine life. Slowly but surely physical
developments on earth and in adjacent space regions are
preparing the stage for the later attempts to establish such
life forms as we had decided would be best adapted to the
unfolding physical environment -- both terrestrial and spatial.
58:1.6 Subsequently the Satania commission of
Life Carriers returned to Jerusem, preferring to await the
further breakup of the continental land mass, which would afford
still more inland seas and sheltered bays, before actually
beginning life implantation.
58:1.7 On a planet where life has a marine
origin the ideal conditions for life implantation are provided
by a large number of inland seas, by an extensive shore line of
shallow waters and sheltered bays; and just such a distribution
of the earth's waters was rapidly developing. These ancient
inland seas were seldom over five or six hundred feet deep, and
sunlight can penetrate ocean water for more than six hundred
feet.
58:1.8 And it was from such seashores of the
mild and equable climes of a later age that primitive plant life
found its way onto the land. There the high degree of carbon in
the atmosphere afforded the new land varieties of life
opportunity for speedy and luxuriant growth. Though this
atmosphere was then ideal for plant growth, it contained such a
high degree of carbon dioxide that no animal, much less man,
could have lived on the face of the earth.
2. THE URANTIA ATMOSPHERE
58:2.1 The planetary atmosphere filters
through to the earth about one two-billionths of the sun's total
light emanation. If the light falling upon North America were
paid for at the rate of two cents per kilowatt-hour, the annual
light bill would be upward of 800 quadrillion dollars. Chicago's
bill for sunshine would amount to considerably over 100 million
dollars a day. And it should be remembered that you receive from
the sun other forms of energy -- light is not the only solar
contribution reaching your atmosphere. Vast solar energies pour
in upon Urantia embracing wave lengths ranging both above and
below the recognition range of human vision.
58:2.2 The earth's atmosphere is all but
opaque to much of the solar radiation at the extreme ultraviolet
end of the spectrum. Most of these short wave lengths are
absorbed by a layer of ozone which exists throughout a level
about ten miles above the surface of the earth, and which
extends spaceward for another ten miles. The ozone permeating
this region, at conditions prevailing on the earth's surface,
would make a layer only one tenth of an inch thick;
nevertheless, this relatively small and apparently insignificant
amount of ozone protects Urantia inhabitants from the excess of
these dangerous and destructive ultraviolet radiations present
in sunlight. But were this ozone layer just a trifle thicker,
you would be deprived of the highly important and health-giving
ultraviolet rays which now reach the earth's surface, and which
are ancestral to one of the most essential of your vitamins.
58:2.3 And yet some of the less imaginative of
your mortal mechanists insist on viewing material creation and
human evolution as an accident. The Urantia midwayers have
assembled over fifty thousand facts of physics and chemistry
which they deem to be incompatible with the laws of accidental
chance, and which they contend unmistakably demonstrate the
presence of intelligent purpose in the material creation. And
all of this takes no account of their catalogue of more than one
hundred thousand findings outside the domain of physics and
chemistry which they maintain prove the presence of mind in the
planning, creation, and maintenance of the material cosmos.
58:2.4 Your sun pours forth a veritable flood
of death-dealing rays, and your pleasant life on Urantia is due
to the "fortuitous" influence of more than two-score apparently
accidental protective operations similar to the action of this
unique ozone layer.
58:2.5 Were it not for the "blanketing" effect
of the atmosphere at night, heat would be lost by radiation so
rapidly that life would be impossible of maintenance except by
artificial provision.
58:2.6 The lower five or six miles of the
earth's atmosphere is the troposphere; this is the region of
winds and air currents which provide weather phenomena. Above
this region is the inner ionosphere and next above is the
stratosphere. Ascending from the surface of the earth, the
temperature steadily falls for six or eight miles, at which
height it registers around 70 degrees below zero F. This
temperature range of from 65 to 70 degrees below zero F. is
unchanged in the further ascent for forty miles; this realm of
constant temperature is the stratosphere. At a height of
forty-five or fifty miles, the temperature begins to rise, and
this increase continues until, at the level of the auroral
displays, a temperature of 1200° F. is attained, and it is this
intense heat that ionizes the oxygen. But temperature in such a
rarefied atmosphere is hardly comparable with heat reckoning at
the surface of the earth. Bear in mind that one half of all your
atmosphere is to be found in the first three miles. The height
of the earth's atmosphere is indicated by the highest auroral
streamers -- about four hundred miles.
58:2.7 Auroral phenomena are directly related
to sunspots, those solar cyclones which whirl in opposite
directions above and below the solar equator, even as do the
terrestrial tropical hurricanes. Such atmospheric disturbances
whirl in opposite directions when occurring above or below the
equator.
58:2.8 The power of sunspots to alter light
frequencies shows that these solar storm centers function as
enormous magnets. Such magnetic fields are able to hurl charged
particles from the sunspot craters out through space to the
earth's outer atmosphere, where their ionizing influence
produces such spectacular auroral displays. Therefore do you
have the greatest auroral phenomena when sunspots are at their
height -- or soon thereafter -- at which time the spots are more
generally equatorially situated.
58:2.9 Even the compass needle is responsive
to this solar influence since it turns slightly to the east as
the sun rises and slightly to the west as the sun nears setting.
This happens every day, but during the height of sunspot cycles
this variation of the compass is twice as great. These diurnal
wanderings of the compass are in response to the increased
ionization of the upper atmosphere, which is produced by the
sunlight.
58:2.10 It is the presence of two different
levels of electrified conducting regions in the
superstratosphere that accounts for the long-distance
transmission of your long- and short-wave radiobroadcasts. Your
broadcasting is sometimes disturbed by the terrific storms which
occasionally rage in the realms of these outer ionospheres.
3. SPATIAL ENVIRONMENT
58:3.1 During the earlier times of universe
materialization the space regions are interspersed with vast
hydrogen clouds, just such astronomic dust clusters as now
characterize many regions throughout remote space. Much of the
organized matter which the blazing suns break down and disperse
as radiant energy was originally built up in these early
appearing hydrogen clouds of space. Under certain unusual
conditions atom disruption also occurs at the nucleus of the
larger hydrogen masses. And all of these phenomena of atom
building and atom dissolution, as in the highly heated nebulae,
are attended by the emergence of flood tides of short space rays
of radiant energy. Accompanying these diverse radiations is a
form of space-energy unknown on Urantia.
58:3.2 This short-ray energy charge of
universe space is four hundred times greater than all other
forms of radiant energy existing in the organized space domains.
The output of short space rays, whether coming from the blazing
nebulae, tense electric fields, outer space, or the vast
hydrogen dust clouds, is modified qualitatively and
quantitatively by fluctuations of, and sudden tension changes
in, temperature, gravity, and electronic pressures.
58:3.3 These eventualities in the origin of
the space rays are determined by many cosmic occurrences as well
as by the orbits of circulating matter, which vary from modified
circles to extreme ellipses. Physical conditions may also be
greatly altered because the electron spin is sometimes in the
opposite direction from that of the grosser matter behavior,
even in the same physical zone.
58:3.4 The vast hydrogen clouds are veritable
cosmic chemical laboratories, harboring all phases of evolving
energy and metamorphosing matter. Great energy actions also
occur in the marginal gases of the great binary stars which so
frequently overlap and hence extensively commingle. But none of
these tremendous and far-flung energy activities of space exerts
the least influence upon the phenomena of organized life -- the
germ plasm of living things and beings. These energy conditions
of space are germane to the essential environment of life
establishment, but they are not effective in the subsequent
modification of the inheritance factors of the germ plasm as are
some of the longer rays of radiant energy. The implanted life of
the Life Carriers is fully resistant to all of this amazing
flood of the short space rays of universe energy.
58:3.5 All of these essential cosmic
conditions had to evolve to a favorable status before the Life
Carriers could actually begin the establishment of life on
Urantia.
4. THE LIFE-DAWN ERA
58:4.1 That we are called Life Carriers should
not confuse you. We can and do carry life to the planets, but we
brought no life to Urantia. Urantia life is unique, original
with the planet. This sphere is a life-modification world; all
life appearing hereon was formulated by us right here on the
planet; and there is no other world in all Satania, even in all
Nebadon, that has a life existence just like that of Urantia.
58:4.2 550,000,000 years ago the Life
Carrier corps returned to Urantia. In co-operation with
spiritual powers and superphysical forces we organized and
initiated the original life patterns of this world and planted
them in the hospitable waters of the realm. All planetary life
(aside from extraplanetary personalities) down to the days of
Caligastia, the Planetary Prince, had its origin in our three
original, identical, and simultaneous marine-life implantations.
These three life implantations have been designated as: the
central or Eurasian-African, the eastern or
Australasian, and the western, embracing Greenland and
the Americas.
58:4.3 500,000,000 years ago primitive
marine vegetable life was well established on Urantia. Greenland
and the arctic land mass, together with North and South America,
were beginning their long and slow westward drift. Africa moved
slightly south, creating an east and west trough, the
Mediterranean basin, between itself and the mother body.
Antarctica, Australia, and the land indicated by the islands of
the Pacific broke away on the south and east and have drifted
far away since that day.
58:4.4 We had planted the primitive form of
marine life in the sheltered tropic bays of the central seas of
the east-west cleavage of the breaking-up continental land mass.
Our purpose in making three marine-life implantations was to
insure that each great land mass would carry this life with it,
in its warm-water seas, as the land subsequently separated. We
foresaw that in the later era of the emergence of land life
large oceans of water would separate these drifting continental
land masses.
5. THE CONTINENTAL DRIFT
58:5.1 The continental land drift continued.
The earth's core had become as dense and rigid as steel, being
subjected to a pressure of almost 25,000 tons to the square
inch, and owing to the enormous gravity pressure, it was and
still is very hot in the deep interior. The temperature
increases from the surface downward until at the center it is
slightly above the surface temperature of the sun.
58:5.2 The outer one thousand miles of the
earth's mass consists principally of different kinds of rock.
Underneath are the denser and heavier metallic elements.
Throughout the early and preatmospheric ages the world was so
nearly fluid in its molten and highly heated state that the
heavier metals sank deep into the interior. Those found near the
surface today represent the exudate of ancient volcanoes, later
and extensive lava flows, and the more recent meteoric deposits.
58:5.3 The outer crust was about forty miles
thick. This outer shell was supported by, and rested directly
upon, a molten sea of basalt of varying thickness, a mobile
layer of molten lava held under high pressure but always tending
to flow hither and yon in equalization of shifting planetary
pressures, thereby tending to stabilize the earth's crust.
58:5.4 Even today the continents continue to
float upon this noncrystallized cushiony sea of molten basalt.
Were it not for this protective condition, the more severe
earthquakes would literally shake the world to pieces.
Earthquakes are caused by sliding and shifting of the solid
outer crust and not by volcanoes.
58:5.5 The lava layers of the earth's crust,
when cooled, form granite. The average density of Urantia is a
little more than five and one-half times that of water; the
density of granite is less than three times that of water. The
earth's core is twelve times as dense as water.
58:5.6 The sea bottoms are more dense than the
land masses, and this is what keeps the continents above water.
When the sea bottoms are extruded above the sea level, they are
found to consist largely of basalt, a form of lava considerably
heavier than the granite of the land masses. Again, if the
continents were not lighter than the ocean beds, gravity would
draw the edges of the oceans up onto the land, but such
phenomena are not observable.
58:5.7 The weight of the oceans is also a
factor in the increase of pressure on the sea beds. The lower
but comparatively heavier ocean beds, plus the weight of the
overlying water, approximate the weight of the higher but much
lighter continents. But all continents tend to creep into the
oceans. The continental pressure at ocean-bottom levels is about
20,000 pounds to the square inch. That is, this would be the
pressure of a continental mass standing 15,000 feet above the
ocean floor. The ocean-floor water pressure is only about 5,000
pounds to the square inch. These differential pressures tend to
cause the continents to slide toward the ocean beds.
58:5.8 Depression of the ocean bottom during
the prelife ages had upthrust a solitary continental land mass
to such a height that its lateral pressure tended to cause the
eastern, western, and southern fringes to slide downhill, over
the underlying semiviscous lava beds, into the waters of the
surrounding Pacific Ocean. This so fully compensated the
continental pressure that a wide break did not occur on the
eastern shore of this ancient Asiatic continent, but ever since
has that eastern coast line hovered over the precipice of its
adjoining oceanic depths, threatening to slide into a watery
grave.
6. THE TRANSITION PERIOD
58:6.1 450,000,000 years ago the
transition from vegetable to animal life occurred. This
metamorphosis took place in the shallow waters of the sheltered
tropic bays and lagoons of the extensive shore lines of the
separating continents. And this development, all of which was
inherent in the original life patterns, came about gradually.
There were many transitional stages between the early primitive
vegetable forms of life and the later well-defined animal
organisms. Even today the transition slime molds persist, and
they can hardly be classified either as plants or as animals.
58:6.2 Although the evolution of vegetable
life can be traced into animal life, and though there have been
found graduated series of plants and animals which progressively
lead up from the most simple to the most complex and advanced
organisms, you will not be able to find such connecting links
between the great divisions of the animal kingdom nor between
the highest of the prehuman animal types and the dawn men of the
human races. These so-called "missing links" will forever remain
missing, for the simple reason that they never existed.
58:6.3 From era to era radically new species
of animal life arise. They do not evolve as the result of the
gradual accumulation of small variations; they appear as
full-fledged and new orders of life, and they appear suddenly.
58:6.4 The sudden appearance of new
species and diversified orders of living organisms is wholly
biologic, strictly natural. There is nothing supernatural
connected with these genetic mutations.
58:6.5 At the proper degree of saltiness in
the oceans animal life evolved, and it was comparatively simple
to allow the briny waters to circulate through the animal bodies
of marine life. But when the oceans were contracted and the
percentage of salt was greatly increased, these same animals
evolved the ability to reduce the saltiness of their body fluids
just as those organisms which learned to live in fresh water
acquired the ability to maintain the proper degree of sodium
chloride in their body fluids by ingenious techniques of salt
conservation.
58:6.6 Study of the rock-embraced fossils of
marine life reveals the early adjustment struggles of these
primitive organisms. Plants and animals never cease to make
these adjustment experiments. Ever the environment is changing,
and always are living organisms striving to accommodate
themselves to these never-ending fluctuations.
58:6.7 The physiologic equipment and the
anatomic structure of all new orders of life are in response to
the action of physical law, but the subsequent endowment of mind
is a bestowal of the adjutant mind-spirits in accordance with
innate brain capacity. Mind, while not a physical evolution, is
wholly dependent on the brain capacity afforded by purely
physical and evolutionary developments.
58:6.8 Through almost endless cycles of gains
and losses, adjustments and readjustments, all living organisms
swing back and forth from age to age. Those that attain cosmic
unity persist, while those that fall short of this goal cease to
exist.
7. THE GEOLOGIC HISTORY BOOK
58:7.1 The vast group of rock systems which
constituted the outer crust of the world during the life-dawn or
Proterozoic era does not now appear at many points on the
earth's surface. And when it does emerge from below all the
accumulations of subsequent ages, there will be found only the
fossil remains of vegetable and early primitive animal life.
Some of these older water-deposited rocks are commingled with
subsequent layers, and sometimes they yield fossil remains of
some of the earlier forms of vegetable life, while on the
topmost layers occasionally may be found some of the more
primitive forms of the early marine-animal organisms. In many
places these oldest stratified rock layers, bearing the fossils
of the early marine life, both animal and vegetable, may be
found directly on top of the older undifferentiated stone.
58:7.2 Fossils of this era yield algae,
corallike plants, primitive Protozoa, and spongelike transition
organisms. But the absence of such fossils in the early rock
layers does not necessarily prove that living things were not
elsewhere in existence at the time of their deposition. Life was
sparse throughout these early times and only slowly made its way
over the face of the earth.
58:7.3 The rocks of this olden age are now at
the earth's surface, or very near the surface, over about one
eighth of the present land area. The average thickness of this
transition stone, the oldest stratified rock layers, is about
one and one-half miles. At some points these ancient rock
systems are as much as four miles thick, but many of the layers
which have been ascribed to this era belong to later periods.
58:7.4 In North America this ancient and
primitive fossil-bearing stone layer comes to the surface over
the eastern, central, and northern regions of Canada. There is
also an intermittent east-west ridge of this rock which extends
from Pennsylvania and the ancient Adirondack Mountains on west
through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Other ridges run
from Newfoundland to Alabama and from Alaska to Mexico.
58:7.5 The rocks of this era are exposed here
and there all over the world, but none are so easy of
interpretation as those about Lake Superior and in the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado River, where these primitive
fossil-bearing rocks, existing in several layers, testify to the
upheavals and surface fluctuations of those faraway times.
58:7.6 This stone layer, the oldest
fossil-bearing stratum in the crust of the earth, has been
crumpled, folded, and grotesquely twisted as a result of the
upheavals of earthquakes and the early volcanoes. The lava flows
of this age brought much iron, copper, and lead up near the
planetary surface.
58:7.7 There are few places on the earth where
such activities are more graphically shown than in the St. Croix
valley of Wisconsin. In this region there occurred one hundred
and twenty-seven successive lava flows on land with succeeding
water submergence and consequent rock deposition. Although much
of the upper rock sedimentation and intermittent lava flow is
absent today, and though the bottom of this system is buried
deep in the earth, nevertheless, about sixty-five or seventy of
these stratified records of past ages are now exposed to view.
58:7.8 In these early ages when much land was
near sea level, there occurred many successive submergences and
emergences. The earth's crust was just entering upon its later
period of comparative stabilization. The undulations, rises and
dips, of the earlier continental drift contributed to the
frequency of the periodic submergence of the great land masses.
58:7.9 During these times of primitive marine
life, extensive areas of the continental shores sank beneath the
seas from a few feet to half a mile. Much of the older sandstone
and conglomerates represents the sedimentary accumulations of
these ancient shores. The sedimentary rocks belonging to this
early stratification rest directly upon those layers which date
back far beyond the origin of life, back to the early appearance
of the world-wide ocean.
58:7.10 Some of the upper layers of these
transition rock deposits contain small amounts of shale or slate
of dark colors, indicating the presence of organic carbon and
testifying to the existence of the ancestors of those forms of
plant life which overran the earth during the succeeding
Carboniferous or coal age. Much of the copper in these rock
layers results from water deposition. Some is found in the
cracks of the older rocks and is the concentrate of the sluggish
swamp water of some ancient sheltered shore line. The iron mines
of North America and Europe are located in deposits and
extrusions lying partly in the older unstratified rocks and
partly in these later stratified rocks of the transition periods
of life formation.
58:7.11 This era witnesses the spread of life
throughout the waters of the world; marine life has become well
established on Urantia. The bottoms of the shallow and extensive
inland seas are being gradually overrun by a profuse and
luxuriant growth of vegetation, while the shore-line waters are
swarming with the simple forms of animal life.
58:7.12 All of this story is graphically told
within the fossil pages of the vast "stone book" of world
record. And the pages of this gigantic biogeologic record
unfailingly tell the truth if you but acquire skill in their
interpretation. Many of these ancient sea beds are now elevated
high upon land, and their deposits of age upon age tell the
story of the life struggles of those early days. It is literally
true, as your poet has said, "The dust we tread upon was once
alive."
58:7.13
Presented by a member of the Urantia Life Carrier Corps now
resident on the planet.
