Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings

Author:Lee Billings
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Out of Equilibrium

An earth scientist’s tendency to see the Big Picture at the expense of smaller details helps explain something that happened to me one morning in the red-brick Deike Building that houses the Marcellus Center and Penn State’s geosciences department. I was standing next to a bank of elevators in an otherwise empty corridor, waiting to meet someone. A short, bespectacled man in a button-down flannel shirt and khaki pants rounded a corner, glanced at me as he walked past, and entered a nearby bathroom. A minute passed, then the man reemerged and walked by me again, pausing to sip from a water fountain before making to return down the hall. When he was a few steps from vanishing around the corner, I called out to him, and when he turned around to look he didn’t seem to immediately recognize me.

I was surprised, since I recognized him as Jim Kasting, a geosciences professor at Penn State specializing in the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere and climate. After more than two hours of conversation in a noisy bar/restaurant called “Mad Mex” the previous evening, we had agreed to meet that morning to talk more about his work. I had spoken with him on the phone minutes earlier when I had arrived at Deike, but when he passed me twice in the hall I might as well have been one of the specimens of sedimentary rock in the glass cases that lined the wall.

“Oh,” he said at last. “Hi, Lee. Didn’t see you there. Let’s go into my office.”

Picture a NASA astronaut—not so much the stereotypical fighter-plane jock from the Space Race, but the post-Apollo variety, a straitlaced fitness buff with an advanced academic pedigree—and you probably have summoned a good approximation of Jim Kasting. Kasting is fifty-eight but looks years younger thanks to a strict regimen of swimming, running, and weight lifting. He is bookishly handsome, with a wide, magisterial forehead and the compact, sinewy build of a wrestler. He is equally at home discussing either the finer points of planetary carbon cycles or the benefits of rear-wheel drive on sports cars. Kasting speaks with clipped precision, and emotion rarely shades his voice. He never seems to be in any big hurry yet manages to be monumentally productive. His most astronautical quality, however, is something more subtle: a serenity that suggests awareness of one’s inescapably small place in the world, an acceptance awakened by long hours spent contemplating the Earth from some lofty perch.

Kasting’s resemblance to an astronaut was apt given his upbringing, which we had discussed over a cacophony of drunken Penn State coeds and a dinner of one-dollar tacos the previous night. He and his identical twin brother, Jerry, were born in Schenectady, New York, in the wee hours of January 2 in 1953. A younger sister, Sandy, arrived years later. His mother stayed at home raising her children, though she would later use her degrees in chemistry and mathematics to teach college courses. His father was a mechanical and electrical engineer, building jet engines as a subcontractor for General Electric.

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