At 12:51 PM 8/6/99 -0700, Peter McCluskey wrote:
> See Barrow and Tipler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, pages 567-569.
>They show a long-term trend of rising oxygen levels which threatens to cause
>most vegetation exposed to the atmosphere to burn 200 million years from now.
What do you mean 'to burn' exactly? I'll assume that includes the death of
all terrestrial plant life. 200 million years seems like an awfully short
time, geologicaly.
I'm thinking of this in terms of a 'Great Filter' i.e. If intelligent life
has to evolve before oxygen destroys plants (and then just about all life)
and WE made it with only 200 million years to spare...
Of course marine plants aren't exposed to the atmoshpere.