Review Article

The Natural Science Underlying Big History

Figure 5

The value of Φm for Earth increased by roughly an order of magnitude over the course of our planet’s ~4.5 Gy history as internal heat first structured our planet’s solid interior and then external solar energy organized its gas-liquid climasphere. This graph pertains to the middle part of the master graph in Figure 2, much as expected for any relatively simple inanimate system complexifying during the physical-evolutionary phase of cosmic evolution.
384912.fig.005