Exhaustion? Prosperity? — 06. Lecture #5. Earth Functioning

This lecture is unusual in the number of videos included. However, these video fragments are not redundant. It is necessary to understand rather nontrivial ideas about the functioning of Earth. We have already noted that common sense (the trivial perception of Earth) pushes us to see it simply as a stage on which life unfolds. Sometimes this stage seems favorable, sometimes even dangerous, but these seem to be separate things: us and everything around us. In fact, no. Both we ourselves and what surrounds us are parts of a single process. The two main themes of this lecture are plate tectonics as a consequence of Earth’s internal activity, and the magnetic field, which is connected both with active Earth interiors and with Earth’s rotational braking due to its anomalously large satellite.