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

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The first rumbles of an oncoming storm came from the rifting and breakup of a supercontinent, Rodinia. This included every significant landmass at the time.29 One consequence of the breakup was a series of ice ages that covered the entire globe, the like of which had not been seen since the Great Oxidation Event. But life responded once again by rising to the challenge. 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 warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. Dr. Henry Gee, a Senior Editor at the esteemed, and one of the oldest scientific journals in the world, Nature, is coming out with a new book! This book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters,Is a wonderful telling of, well us, and everything you see around you, and how you got here. A scintillating, fast-paced waltz through four billion years of evolution, from one of our leading science writers. As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century. 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. In the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Bill Bryson, and Simon Winchester—An entertaining and uniquely informed narration of Life's life story. From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you’ve never seen it before.This book gives a fascinating and easily understandable overview of the rise and progress of life on Earth. It's a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. Under a microscope, bacterial cells appear simple and featureless. This simplicity is deceptive. In terms of their habits and habitats, bacteria are highly adaptable. They can live almost anywhere. The number of bacterial cells in (and on) a human body is very much greater than the number of human cells in that same body. Despite the fact that some bacteria cause serious disease, we could not survive without the help of the bacteria that live in our guts and enable us to digest our food. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Once upon a time, a giant star was dying. It had been burning for millions of years; now the fusion furnace at its core had no more fuel to burn. The star created the energy it needed to shine by fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium. The energy produced by the fusion did more than make the star shine. It was vital to counteract the inward pull of the star’s own gravity. When the supply of available hydrogen began to run low, the star began to fuse helium into atoms of heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. By then, though, the star was running out of things to burn.

Another amazing early vertebrate adaptation was the development of air sacs, which first arose in dinosaurs and are still found in birds. This adaptation, which enabled a one-way system of air flow, also doubled as an efficient cooling system for internal organs. 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 Terrifying. As described on the cover, this is a very concise history of the forming of the Earth and the various ages it went through; including the evolution of life and the creatures we now know today (don't worry, the dinosaurs are in here too). 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 is talented when it comes to breaking down the science into general terms. Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Gee writes lucid, accessible prose." 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' - The Times

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Viewed from the kind of wide-angle perspective that Gee opens up, our human presence looks vanishingly insignificant. And yet we have huge significance as the first and only species to be aware of itself. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow species, to conserve what we have and to make the best of our brief existence. For People Who Devour Books Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’