Nick Szabo  🔑

Perhaps over 800 million years ago, long before land was colonized by plants, land was first colonized by lichens. By opening up an entire new environment, land instead of just sea, lichens increased the scale of life itself.

To be pioneers of dead rock lichens, a symbiosis of algae & fungus, have to do everything for themselves: convert CO2 & H2O into carbohydrates via photosynthesis, fix nitrogen, & obtain phosphate. But on land phosphate is embedded in rock, not dissolved in seawater. How to get?

That's where the fungus half of the lichen partnership comes in. It grows hyphae, tiny root-like structures that crack rock, increasing its surface area. It then uses oxalic acid to dissolve phosphate out of that new surface. Then it can absorb phosphate much as it would at sea.

Now let's loop back. Drinking room-temperature alcohol, Europe developed glass craft while hot-tea-drinking China developed porcelain. Europeans look at chemical reactions through glass & discover modern chemistry, but "china" is still the envy of the world.

Beating back the pioneering Iberians, Britain now dominates the world's seas. Following on long Veblen good pattern, English upper classes covet tea and tea-drinking apparatus from the opposite side of the planet, and the middle classes want to emulate them, but can't afford it.

In steps the English entrepreneur, who following on Dutch work figures out how to make cheap but workable knockoffs of Chinese porcelain ("china"). Among the techniques are grinding flint with water or steam power, and by the mid 18th century grinding bone to make bone china.

Crushing & grinding greatly increases the surface area of bone much as the lichen's hyphae does for rock. Next step was applying sulfuric acid to the ground bone or apatite rock, giving us superphosphate, much as lichen applies oxalic acid to dissolve phosphate from cracked rock.