Rick Wakeman playing piano on Cat Steven’s “Morning Has Broken”

You think spelling is hard in English, try French! Half the letters in most words are silent!

Unlikely. Considering the enormous masses of the Pacific plate and the North American plate, the mass of the water on California is relatively tiny. Simplistically, earthquakes are the release of one plate being crushed into another. I know, the San Andreas is a transform boundary. I lived next to it most of my life in Southern California. It slides about as smoothly as a couple of pieces of coarse sandpaper rubbing together! They’re relatively easy in comparison! Remember Newton’s formula F=ma, where mass is both plates, acceleration is the distance roughly of a fingernail. F is is going to be some insanely huge number—small wonder earthquakes are so bad!

It is! I’ve seen it once in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, years ago. Spectacular!

Lightning is the product of static electricity within a cloud. It’s literally static discharge—the same as you scuffling your feet across a carpeted room and then reaching for a doorknob or something metal. Your body is superb at transmitting that charge and you produce that mini lightning bolt you feel as a shock. So what does this have to do with a rain or snow cloud? Heat in the air from below the cloud helps it pile high and get countless billions of water droplets rubbing against each other up and down inside the cloud. Eventually enough static electricity is built up to be released as lightning, However, in snow clouds it’s just too cold! Not enough heat to get ice crystals to rub each other and produce static electricity. That’s why places like Arizona or Florida have spectacular lightning storms—they’re warm or hot climates. Not cold and snowy like Minnesota or New York.

Greenhouse gas dating is done with ice cores—mostly from Antarctica glaciers. Those date back to at least 2 million years ago. Bubbles of atmosphere get trapped in the ice, which allows us to study ancient atmospheric composition during the growth and decline of various ice ages in the past. Radioactive dating is what we can use on fossils or certain types of rock. The other, easier form of dating is by the use of index fossils. Also, stratigraphy rears its ugly head to help date strata, and drive geology students mad.

Excellent illustration! I used this to demonstrate the constant acceleration of planets in orbit around the sun.

Evolution never really stops. Alleles of genes mix in every generation in sexual reproduction. If the organism is well adapted to one or more environments, the resulting mutations in offspring create little change. Once the environment changes—which is pretty much a guarantee on Earth thanks to plate tectonics and ensuing climate change—then those mutations become critical to the organism’s survival. It’s a matter of what traits allow an organism to live long enough to successfully reproduce. That’s the central dogma of natural selection.

It’s possible in some extreme environment that could have been the norm billions of years ago here on Earth—but a life form from scratch would have to compete with evolved organisms soon enough and would likely end up as food for some other organisms.

Easy: try Jupiter or Mars. They’re both easy to spot. Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky other than the moon. You’ll see the four Galilean moons easily enough. Of course, the moon itself—hint: now’s the perfect time. You’ll see craters in nice sharp contrast. Don’t look at it when it’s a full moon—you’ll go damn near blind!

We’re just prejudiced against arthropods and favor mammals. Or is it we’d rather eat them? Eating a spider, or eating a pussy…hmm…