Is it the ultimate luxury to be able to lather your skin with natural oils and plant extracts that are so cosmically rare we would need to defend them from extraterrestrial life?
If aliens were to visit earth, they wouldn’t be interested in our diamonds and gold – after all, scientists believe there is “diamond rain” on Neptune and Uranus – they would be most intrigued by our trees and our oceans.
On a cosmic scale, trees are rarer than diamonds.
In space, diamonds are abundant and carbon is the most common element out there. Diamonds can be mined from meteorites and dead stars. Diamonds are 99.95% pure carbon. They are made of the exact same element as the graphite inside your pencil. The magic that results in a diamond happens when intense heat and pressure force the carbon atoms into a tight, three-dimensional crystal lattice, producing the hardest known natural material.
Trees, however, require life. Earth is currently the only place, out of trillions of planets in the observable universe, to grow trees. Wood is made of biological structures like cellulose and lignin, only living organisms can grow these. It is an incredibly complex biological material that cannot exist without highly evolved, living cells. As far as scientists know, the precise recipe of biochemistry to produce wood has only ever happened once in cosmic history.
When we consider the rarity of life itself, how does this shift perspective on what is truly important?
The evolutionary requirements to produce trees lends even more appreciation on how rare they truly are. The planet must sit in a stable zone, have liquid water, a protective atmosphere and the perfect chemical concoction to spark microbial life.
For the first 3 billion years of life on Earth, there were no trees. No land plants. Imagine life without the beauty of roses, the fragrance of jasmine, the shade of the eucalypts?
Life was single celled before it started to evolve into simple algae and mosses.
400 million years ago, plants developed plumbing – vascular systems that helped them transport water. To support the weight of this plumbing, they grew taller, competed for sunlight and eventually evolved to produce lignin, creating the very first wood.
That tree in your backyard is literally an unrivalled cosmic rarity.
We could then, consider plants to be the ultimate luxury good. Everyday timber and houseplants might seem in great abundance and equally affordable, but what nature gives, nature can take away. Then there are plants, oils, woods, and seeds that are even more scarce, require immense craftsmanship, biological stress or labour-intensive harvesting to be obtainable or useful to us.
When we think of our own precious oils – Tea Tree and Blue Mallee Eucalyptus – we think how lucky are we? It required supreme synchronicity of biological and evolutionary events to have access to these powerful oils.
First, plant life had to evolve through perfect conditions to produce on earth. Then through droughts and floods and harsh environmental conditions the Tea Tree and Eucalypt plants sustained life and became deeply potent by holding onto nutrients. The Bundjalung people in northern NSW held traditional knowledge that these plants were remedial and used them for a range of functions, including knowing that the tea tree leaves would release their oils into lagoons, which they would then bathe in to resolve skin issues in the so-called "healing waters." Eventually humans figured out how to extract the oils, as we do at ETTO, using steam to contain the oil into its own form separate from the biomass.
So, something that seems so commonplace is in fact a miracle, hiding in plain sight perhaps. And something that we placed so much currency onto, is in fact quite abundant on a cosmic scale.
If we consider our own bodies as equally miraculous and precious, how should we be treating them really? What do we want to have in our environment – diamonds or trees? What do we want to put on our skin? Into our body? Is it the ultimate luxury to be able to lather your skin with natural oils and plant extracts that are so cosmically rare we would need to defend them from extraterrestrial life? Is it the ultimate luxury to bring our bodies into contact with the same nature that created us, instead of the man-made toxic chemicals that we composed out of a scarcity mindset, greed for cheaper materials and more options, that in some cases, we never even needed?
Sources
Gravity assist: It’s Raining Diamonds of These Planets. NASA.
https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-its-raining-diamonds-on-these-planets/
Yes, there really is ‘Diamond Rain’ on Uranus and Neptune. Space.com
https://www.space.com/diamond-rain-atmosphere-uranus-neptune
How Trees changed the world
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-trees-changed-the-world.html
The woody planet: from past triumph to manmade decline
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7698479/
The Story of wood: from ancient origins to modern applications
https://www.woodcentral.com/-/the-story-of-wood-from-ancient-origins-to-modern-applications/
The day I learned wood is more rare than diamonds. Medium.com
https://medium.com/fossils-et-al/the-day-i-learned-wood-is-more-rare-than-diamonds-f294fe4ce5bb
Why Wood May be Rarer Than Diamonds on a Cosmic Scale. Luca Dal Molin.
https://makingdubai.com/blogs/the-makers-guide/why-wood-may-be-rarer-than-diamonds
