A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters

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I can honestly say this book terrified me yet gave me hope at the same time. I know you're probably thinking, really? It's a book about the history of the earth, what exactly are you terrified about? Well, for one, it's truly astounding just how many times the earth has nearly wiped out all life in its existence. in chapter 3 for example, author uses a tons of extinct species to tell facts of evolutionary history, it becomes difficult to imagine them in a sentence of information, most of them you might have never heard of them. so it made sense to constantly look at Google images to see what he was telling about. majority of facts won't even stay in your head as a lot of these species won't live more than a sentence or two Another masterful aspect of the structure is the way that the first eight chapters build in a kind of crescendo, then the whole thing widens out with first the development of apes, then hominins, then humans and finally looks forward to the future. I use a musical term intentionally - this feels like a well-crafted piece of music, pushing us on to the big finish. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Schade, dass es außer den schematischen Karten der Erdzeitalter keine Illustrationen gibt, die diese Vielfalt auch optisch verdeutlichen, obwohl die für ein Sachbuch durchaus bildhafte Schreibweise doch die Vorstellungskraft anregt. Wer als Kind mit Dinosauriern auf du und du war, ist hier klar im Vorteil. Der Anspruch, das zeigt schon der Titel, ist nicht, das endgültige Buch über die Geschichte des Lebens auf der Erde zu schreiben, sondern einen Abriss in für Laien verständlicher Form zu geben und eine Einordnung zu versuchen. Bringing us to the third section that I have divided this book into, we see the rise of mammals, and other small creatures after the remnants of the dinosaurs’ ashes covered the Earth. And yet, as is the key idea that I believe this book is trying to convey, is Life found a way. Despite all of the challenges that it had faced up until that point, Life was able to continue, and find new ways to grow to extremes and diversify in ways it had never done before. Towards the end of the book, we finally come to where we come in, and what a small section there is about us. This is appropriate, for, in the grand scheme of geologic time, we have, to take a word from the title, left a pithy mark on this planet. From there, we go into the future, discussing how Humanity’s population will finally begin to drop in 2100, and how after a few tens of thousands of years after that, we will be extinct, like so many other organisms that have gone before us.My favourite chapter of all, even though it's inevitably speculative, was the one titled The Past of the Future, where Gee takes us through what is likely to happen to life on a future Earth, including its our and its eventual extinction - this has a slightly wistful, but inevitable feel to it and is quite remarkable. This takes us around a billion years ahead from now - so the whole span of the book is more like 5.5 billion years. Reader's Digest Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives Unlike carbon dioxide, oxygen might be thought of as an all-round good thing, essential to life on Earth. And yet it was a sudden surge of free oxygen that caused the Great Oxidation Event, unleashing the first of many mass extinctions that pepper the history of this planet. All that oxygen scrubbed the air of the carbon dioxide and methane that were keeping Earth warm and launched the first and longest ice age, 300 million years during which the planet became ‘Snowball Earth’, covered from pole to pole with ice. ‘And yet,’ observes Gee calmly, ‘the Great Oxidation Event and subsequent “Snowball Earth” episode were the kinds of apocalyptic disasters in which life on Earth has always thrived.’ A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers . . . His poetic prose animates the history of life, from the first bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to us.

The Earth’s heat, radiating outward from the molten core, keeps the planet forever on the boil, just like a pan of water simmering on a stove. Heat rising to the surface softens the overlying layers, breaking up the less dense but more solid crust into pieces and, forcing them apart, creates new oceans between. These pieces, the tectonic plates, are forever in motion. They bump against, slide past, or burrow beneath one another. This movement carves deep trenches in the ocean floor and raises mountains high above it. It causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It builds new land.The evolution of the nucleus allowed for a more organized system of reproduction. Bacterial cells generally reproduce by dividing in half to create two identical copies of the parent cell. Variation from the addition of extra genetic material is piecemeal and haphazard.