Viewed from the kind of wide-angle perspective that Gee opens up, our human presence looks vanishingly insignificant. The book was over before I knew it, but I can still say I learned way more than I knew before; in a very easy to understand way. Gee sees human existence as a mere blip in the planet's history, which is simultaneously off putting and bracing (I mean, yeah.

Against the backdrop of geological time,’ Gee reminds us, ‘the sudden rise of humanity is of negligible significance. Well, I don't want to spoil it too much, but he goes into if the Earth continues on its trend that it has for all time, likely we humans won't see some of the truly big cataclysmic events (definitely not in my lifetime anyway). To set the matter into perspective, however, when cyanobacteria were making their first essays into oxygenic photosynthesis—3 billion years ago or more—there was rarely enough free oxygen at any time to count as more than a minor trace pollutant.Okay, I could look it up online, as I did with several examples, but it would have been good to have had them there and then. Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an alluring, up-close intimacy. However, some dinosaurs do still exist, and they became the many of the birds we see around us, including chickens. 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. Methane and carbon dioxide are two of the gases in the downy filling of the insulating blanket that keeps the Earth warm.

The infant Earth was very different to the one that we know today, with an atmosphere of an unbreathable fog of methane, carbon dioxide, water vapour, and hydrogen. The complexities of life, whether it be the carboniferous era "forests" of old, the Lystrosaurus, which for millions of years roamed the Earth as the dominant species on the planet, the evolution of birds from reptilians, and the interesting menagerie of life in the ocean, are all presented well. However, I was listening to the book, and not reading it, and this is where the experience really fell short for me.This book examines life as we know it so far, from its earliest theorized state, with cells beginning to cooperate and form more complex structures, to the advent of single cell, and multicellular life, and its slow evolution into more complex and specialized forms. As life forms evolved and developed, another creature developed a backbone in which other muscles and nerves could attach itself and allowed these creatures to swim faster.

His earlier title The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens.Henry Gee fasst in kompakten Kapiteln zusammen, wie es mit dem Leben in unserem Universum anfing bis zum Entstehen des Homo Sapiens mit einem kurzen Ausblick in die Zukunft am Ende. one of these planets, known as Theia, a planet about the same size as today’s Mars, which, when it struck earth, with a glancing blow and disintegrated, the collision blasted much of the earth’s surface into space, and some of this formed our moon”. 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.

The carbon spike we have contributed to, and which causes us so much anxiety, is high, but on a graph showing trends over millennia it will be very narrow, ‘perhaps too narrow to be detectable in the very long term’. Fortunately, I've watched a lot of science documentaries so I could picture the creatures when he spoke of them. Speculating on the future of life on Earth, Dr Gee proposes an interesting idea for how all life may eventually go extinct on this planet.These small, swift creatures with forward-facing eyes, inclined to curiosity and exploration, would eventually give rise to Homo sapiens. The pull of gravity squeezed the gas at the cloud’s center so much that atoms began to fuse together.