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for its first load of multicellular life, and so it is deposited: the Ediacaran Fauna. Though scientists today have no clear understanding of what the Ediacarans were or what their purpose may have been (because they don't exist today), it seems safe to assume they were even more prolific creators of oxygen than the eukaryotes. If, indeed, terraformers are behind the development of life on Earth, nothing else makes sense. If, on the other hand, every- thing that happened here did so by nothing but blind chance and coincidence, it was the most amazing string of luck imaginable. Everything happened exactly when it need- ed to happen, exactly where it needed to happen, exactly how it needed to happen. If that's not an outright miracle, I don't know what is. the whole panoply of "higher" forms of life on Earth as we have come to know it. (The whys and wherefores of that process are, regrettably, beyond the scope of this essay, but there are answers that have as much apparent sense behind them as what has been outlined.) During those 550 million years, five major and several minor extinction events occurred, after each of which a few million years would pass while the Earth stabilised with environments modified in some way by the catastrophes. Some pre-event life- forms would persist into the new environ- ments, to be joined by new ark-loads deliv- ered by the terraformers, who would analyse the situation on the healing planet and deliver species they knew would sur- vive in the new environments and establish a balance with the life-forms already there (the Interventionist version of punctuated equilibrium). We've already seen the difficulties Darwinists have with trying to explain the flow of life on Earth presented in the fossil record. That record can be explained by the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm, but the veneer of "scholarship" overlaying it is little different from the divine fiat of put onto a forming planet until it is suffi- ciently cooled to have abundant land and water. But once in place and established, their large size (relative to prokaryotes) can metabolise much more oxygen per unit. Together, the fully proliferated prokaryotes and eukaryotes can spew out enough oxy- gen to oxidise every bit of free iron on the Earth's crust and in its seas, and before long be lacing the atmosphere with it. Sure enough, when the terraformers return in another 1.4 billion years they find Earth doing well, but the situation on Mars is unimproved: rust as far as the eye can see. (Mars is likely to have at least prokaryotic life, because there wouldn't have been enough oxygen in the surface water it once had—or in the permafrost it still has—to turn its entire surface into iron oxide.) Earth, however, is doing fine. Most of its free iron is locked up as rust, and oxy- gen levels in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. It's still too soon to think about depositing highly complex life, but that day is not far off now, measurable in tens of millions of years rather than in hundreds of millions. For the moment, Earth is ready MAKING BETTER SENSE Assuming terraformers were/are respon- sible for seeding and developing life on Earth, we can further assume that by 550 million years ago at least the early oceans were sufficiently oxygenated to support genuinely complex life. That was delivered en masse during the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian Explosion, after which followed 76 + NEXUS Darwinism: A Crumbling Theory Continued from page 53 www.nexusmagazine.com DECEMBER 2002 — JANUARY 2003