Nature's Echo : Harnessing Ancient Feedback Loops to Heal a Changing Planet

Learn how an ancient force, dating back to the beginning of time, can be harnessed to solve the world’s biggest problems. In the moments after the big bang, matter started to take shape.Within a few seconds, quarks began combining to form neutrons and protons, which would later form the nuclei of the most basic elements.Minutes passed, then years, then millennia. In this initial emptiness, the underlying processes that would eventually produce our entire world were already underway, a ceaseless dance of evolving matter. And the fundamental steps of that dance, the patterns of interaction that shaped all of the developing matter, are called feedback loops. A feedback loop occurs when the outcome of a process restarts that process, creating a cyclical chain of cause and effect.Feedback loops can either maintain the status quo (a negative feedback loop), or they can create a “snowball effect” (a positive feedback loop) where more begets more.Physical feedback loops literally form our phys