Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

Perhaps nothing speaks more vividly for the strangeness of the times than the fate of the lovely little Bachman’s warbler. A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually thrilling song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds, and that was the last that was ever seen of Bachman’s warblers.

The impulse to exterminate was by no means exclusively American. In Australia, bounties were paid on the Tasmanian tiger (properly the thylacine), a doglike creature with distinctive “tiger” stripes across its back, until shortly before the last one died, forlorn and nameless, in a private Hobart zoo in 1936. Go to the Tasmanian Museum today and ask to see the last of this species-the only large carnivorous marsupial to live into modern times-and all they can show you are photographs. The last surviving thylacine was thrown out with the weekly trash.

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Because we are so remarkably careless about looking after things, both when alive and when not, we have no idea-really none at all-about how many things have died off permanently, or may soon, or may never, and what role we have played in any part of the process. In 1979, in the book The Sinking Ark , the author Norman Myers suggested that human activities were causing about two extinctions a week on the planet. By the early 1990s he had raised the figure to some six hundred per week. (That’s extinctions of all types-plants, insects, and so on as well as animals.) Others have put the figure even higher-to well over a thousand a week. A United Nations report of 1995, on the other hand, put the total number of known extinctions in the last four hundred years at slightly under 500 for animals and slightly over 650 for plants-while allowing that this was “almost certainly an underestimate,” particularly with regard to tropical species. A few interpreters think most extinction figures are grossly inflated.

The fact is, we don’t know. Don’t have any idea. We don’t know when we started doing many of the things we’ve done. We don’t know what we are doing right now or how our present actions will affect the future. What we do know is that there is only one planet to do it on, and only one species of being capable of making a considered difference. Edward O. Wilson expressed it with unimprovable brevity in The Diversity of Life : “One planet, one experiment.”

If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by “we” I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings-that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities-have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.

We really are at the beginning of it all. The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks.

“Protons are so small that . . .” Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 111.

“Now pack into that tiny, tiny space . . .” Guth, The Inflationary Universe , p. 254.

“about 13.7 billion years . . .” U.S. News and World Report , “How Old Is the Universe?” August 18-25, 1997, pp. 34-36; and New York Times, “Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets,” February 12, 2003, p. 1.

“the moment known to science as t = 0 .” Guth, p. 86.

“They climbed back into the dish . . .” Lawrence M. Krauss, “Rediscovering Creation,” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 50.

“an instrument that might do the job . . .” Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos , p. 153.

“They had found the edge of the universe . . .” Scientific American , “Echoes from the Big Bang,” January 2001, pp. 38-43; and Nature , “It All Adds Up,” December 19-26, 2002, p. 733.

“Penzias and Wilson’s finding pushed our acquaintance . . .” Guth, p. 101.

“about 1 percent of the dancing static . . .” Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 18.

“These are very close to religious questions . . .” New York Times , “Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?” May 22, 2001, p. F1.

“or one 10 million trillion trillion trillionth . . .” Alan Lightman, “First Birth,” in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 13.

“He was thirty-two years old . . .” Overbye, p. 216.

“The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest . . .” Guth, p. 89.

“doubling in size every 10 -34seconds.” Overbye, p. 242.

“it changed the universe . . .” New Scientist , “The First Split Second,” March 31, 2001, pp. 27-30.

“perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars . . .” Scientific American , “The First Stars in the Universe,” December 2001, pp. 64-71; and New York Times , “Listen Closely: From Tiny Hum Came Big Bang,” April 30, 2001, p. 1.

“no one had counted the failed attempts.” Quoted by Guth, p. 14.

“He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store . . .” Discover , November 2000.

“with the slightest tweaking of the numbers . . .” Rees, Just Six Numbers , p. 147.

“gravity may turn out to be a little too strong . . .” Financial Times , “Riddle of the Flat Universe,” July 1-2, 2000; and Economist , “The World Is Flat After All,” May 20, 2000, p. 97.

“the galaxies are rushing apart.” Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory , p. 34.

“Scientists just assume that we can’t really be the center . . .” Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 47.

“the universe we know and can talk about . . .” Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 13.

“the number of light-years to the edge . . .” Rees, p. 147.

“From the tiniest throbs and wobbles . . .” New Yorker , “Among Planets,” December 9, 1996, p. 84.

“less than the energy of a single snowflake . . .” Sagan, Cosmos , p. 217.

“a young astronomer named James Christy . . .” U.S. Naval Observatory press release, “20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto’s Moon Charon,” June 22, 1998.