Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annal

Description: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & TechnologyIn its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow, from simulating tsunamis or studying central Turkeys ancient underground cities, to cultivating cyanobacteria for "living cities" or designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever our future holds. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Notes Addresses the realities of global warming and various manmade threats, also making a powerful argument about human ingenuity and ability to survive. Author Biography Annalee Newitz is the founding editor of the science Web site io9.com and a journalist with a decades experience in writing about science, culture, and the future for such publications as Wired, Popular Science, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. She is the editor of the anthology Shes Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Geeky Stuff and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in San Francisco. Review "Terrific. . . . A whirlwind tour of geology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and human history, as Newitz catalogs the terrifying disasters, catastrophes and genocides of geology and antiquity. . . . Its a refreshingly grand sweep for a popular science book. . . . This is a delight of a book, balanced on the knife-edge of disaster and delirious hope."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing "Fascinating. . . . [Newitz is] an excellent writer, with an effortless style. . . . The inner science geek in all of us will uncover some really cool stuff. . . . A terrific book that covers an astounding amount of ground in a manageable 300 pages. Newitz has done all the mental heavy lifting, all the hard work and research, and presented it so you get to enjoy it in a few days or weeks of fun reading. You will be smarter for it."—San Francisco Chronicle "Few things are more enjoyable than touring the apocalypse from the safety of your living room. Even as Scatter, Adapt, and Remember cheerfully reminds us that asteroid impacts, mega-volcanos and methane eruptions are certain to come, it suggests how humankind can survive and even thrive. Yes, Annalee Newitz promises, the world will end with a bang, but our species doesnt have to end with a whimper. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a guide to Homo sapiens next million years. I had fun reading this book and you will too."—Charles Mann, author of 1491 "One of the best popular science books Ive read in a long, long time—and perhaps the only one that takes such a clear-eyed view of the future."—Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus "Keen research and clear writing. . . . Sometimes, a brilliant observer can make an end run around what appears endless scientific quibbling daubed with politics."—The Buffalo News "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a refreshingly optimistic and well thought out dissection of that perennial worry: the coming apocalypse. While everyone else stridently shouts about the end of days, this book asks and answers a simple question: If its so bad, then why are we still alive? I found myself in awe of the incredible extinction events that humankind—and life in general—has already survived, and Newitz inspires us with engaging arguments that our race will keep reaching the end of the world and then keep living through it. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember intimately acquaints the reader with our two-hundred-thousand-year tradition of survival—nothing less than our shared heritage as human beings."—Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse and Amped"This book is not a survivalist guide but rather a grand historical overview that puts humanity in the middle of its evolution, with fascinating looks both back and forward in time. An enormous amount of knowledge is gathered here, and the book accomplishes something almost impossible, being extremely interesting on every single page. A real pleasure to read and think about."—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy"An animated and absorbing account into how life has survived mass extinctions so far . . . and what we need to do to make sure humans dont perish in the next one. . . . Humans may be experts at destroying the planet, but we are no slouches at preserving it, either, and Newitzs shrewd speculations are heartening."—Kirkus Reviews"Newitzs voice is fervent and earnest, and despite her gloomy topic, she leaves readers with hope for a long future."—Publishers Weekly Review Quote "Terrific. . . . A whirlwind tour of geology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and human history, as Newitz catalogs the terrifying disasters, catastrophes and genocides of geology and antiquity. . . . Its a refreshingly grand sweep for a popular science book. . . . Excerpt from Book Excerpted from the hardcover edition. 1. The Apocalypse That Brought Us to Life If you think that humans are destroying the planet in a way thats historically unprecedented, youre suffering from a species-level delusion of grandeur. Were not even the first creatures to pollute the Earth so much that other creatures go extinct. Weirdly, it turns out thats a good thing. If it hadnt been for a bunch of upstart microbes causing an environmental apocalypse over 2 billion years ago, human beings and our ancestors never would have evolved. Indeed, Earths history is full of apocalyptic scenarios where mass death leads to new kinds of life. To appreciate how these strange catastrophes work, well have to travel back in time to our planets beginnings. The Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion-540 million years ago): Oxygen Apocalypse Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and for most of its life the atmosphere would have been noxious for humans and all the creatures who live here now. Vast acidic oceans roiled in what todays environmental scientists would call an extreme greenhouse climate: the air was superheated and filled with methane and carbon. Our planets surface, now covered in cool water and crusty soil, was bubbling with magma. The solar system had formed relatively recently, and chunks of rock hurtled between the young planets--often landing on them with fiery explosions. (One such impact on Earth was so enormous, and threw off so much debris, that it formed the Moon.) It was on this poisonous, inhospitable world that life began. About 2.5 billion years ago, early in an eon that geologists call the Proterozoic, a few hardy microbes who could breathe in this environment drifted to the surface of the oceans. These microbes, called cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae), knit themselves into wrinkled mats of vegetation. They looked like black, frothy coats of slime on the water, trailing long, feathery tendrils beneath the waves. All that remains of this primordial ooze are enigmatic fossils that hide inside a distinctive type of ancient, spherical rock called a stromatolite. If you slice a stromatolite down the middle, youll see thin, dark lines curving across its inner surface like the whorls in a fingerprint--these are all that remain of those algal mats. Only a few people in the world would recognize them as the traces of impossibly old life that they are, and Roger Summons is one of them. Hes a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has spent decades studying the origins of life on Earth, as well as the extinction events that wipe it out. An Australian with a dry sense of humor, Summons has an office you can only reach by walking through his lab, a big, airy room full of tanks of hydrogen and bulky mass spectrometers that look like old-school Xerox machines covered in tubes. When I visited him to talk about ancient Earth, he plucked some slices of stromatolite from the top of a filing cabinet to show me the traces of algae that spidered across their surfaces. "This one is eight hundred million years old, and this one is two-point-four billion," he said, pointing at each ragged half sphere of rock. "Oh, and this one is probably three billion years old, but its a crap sample." Even with a "crap sample," Summons can pin a date on the fossils of creatures who lived more than 2 billion years ago by examining the sediments that have preserved them. In his lab, researchers grind up ancient rocks, subjecting them to vacuum, freezing, lasers, and a strong magnetic field before running them through the mass spectrometers. At that point, often nothing remains of a stromatolite but ionized gas. And thats exactly what mass spectrometers need to decode the atoms in each sample. Atoms in minerals decay at a fixed rate, and reading the state of a rocks atoms can tell scientists how long it has been since it formed. Geologists dont put fossils themselves beneath the laser. They use machines like the ones in Summonss lab to figure out the ages of the rocks next to the fossils. Call it dating by association. Knowing when the oldest stromatolites were created helps us date an event which changed Earth forever. The mats of algae that became stromatolites werent just methane-loving scum. They were also filling the atmosphere with a gas that was deadly to them: oxygen. This is how the first environmental disaster on Earth began. Just like plants today, ancient blue-green algae nourished themselves using photosynthesis, a molecular process that converts light and water into chemical energy. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, and they did it by absorbing photons from sunlight and water molecules from the ocean. Water molecules are made up of three atoms--two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (hence the chemical formula H2O). To nourish themselves, the algae used photons to smash water molecules apart, taking the hydrogen to use as an energy source and releasing the oxygen molecules. This proved to be such a winning adaptation to Earths primordial environment that cyanobacteria spread across the face of the planet, eventually exhaling enough oxygen to set off a cascade of chemical processes that leached methane and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The dominant form of life on Earth ultimately released so much oxygen that it changed the climate dramatically, soon extinguishing most of the life-forms that thrived in a carbon-rich atmosphere. Today we worry that cow farts are destroying the environment with methane; back in the Proterozoic, its certain that algae farts ruined it with oxygen. Greenhouse Becomes Icehouse (and Vice Versa) What happened after the rise of oxygen was an event shrouded in mystery until the late 1980s, when a Caltech geologist named Joe Kirschvink asked his student Dawn Sumner to research a rock whose existence seemed to be impossible--at least, given the prevailing theories about early Earth. Found near the equator, the rocks surface was scored with marks that suggested it had once been scraped by the weight of a slow-moving glacier. In a short paper that eventually revolutionized geologists understanding of climate change, Kirschvink suggested that this rock offered a window on a late-Proterozoic phenomenon he called Snowball Earth. Snowball Earth is what happens when our planets climate enters a very extreme "icehouse" state, the opposite of a greenhouse. A carbon-rich atmosphere can heat our climate up into a sweltering greenhouse, but an oxygen-rich atmosphere cools it down and causes whats called an icehouse. Throughout its life, the planet has vacillated between greenhouses and icehouses as part of a geological process called the carbon cycle. Put in the simplest possible terms, a greenhouse happens when carbon is free in the air, and an icehouse occurs when carbon has been locked down or sequestered in the oceans and rocks. During an icehouse, ice collects at the poles, sometimes creeping down into lower latitudes during an ice age. But our recent ice ages were nothing compared with Snowball Earth. Two billion years ago the sun was dimmer than it is today. As more and more cyanobacteria pumped out oxygen, the whole place began to cool down. Because the sun was a relatively weak heat source, this effect was magnified into a "runaway icehouse." Ice from the poles began to spread outward, solidifying the top layer of the oceans and burying the land beneath vast, frozen sheets. The more ice that formed, the more it reflected sunlight--lowering the planets temperature further. Finally, ice stretched from the poles nearly all the way to the equator, pulverizing rocks beneath its weight. If you looked at Earth from space at that time, youd have seen a slushy white ball, its circumference banded by a narrow equatorial ocean of algae-infested sludge. At that moment in geological history, our planet resembled Saturns icy moon Europa. It was an alien world called Snowball Earth. I visited Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology to find out what happened next. In the basement of the geology building, his generously sized desk was piled with fossils, family photographs, papers, and his prized possession, a cheap plastic vuvuzela from South Africa. "This is real!" he enthused, gesturing at the instrument whose droning sound annoyed and delighted audiences during the 2010 World Cup. Kirschvink lit up when he talked about the provenance of objects, whether pop culture ephemera or 3-billion-year-old fossils. Maybe it was his off-kilter imagination that allowed him to look for environmental patterns in Earths history that nobody had thought possible. Kirschvink believes that there may have been as many as three snowball phases on Earth. "It was the longest, weirdest perturbation in the carbon cycle," Kirschvink said. "And my explanation for it is simple. Its the time between when the biosphere learned to make atmospheric oxygen and the time when everybody else learned to breathe it and use it." Without any creatures around to breathe oxygen, the cyanobacteria likely created an atmosphere far more oxygenated than any weve ever known. For 1.5 billion years after cyanobacteria evolved, Earths biosphere was in chaos. At least two more snowballs crept across the face of the planet, followed by intensely hot greenhouse conditions caused when volcanoes pumped carbon back into the air. Meanwhile, microbes were slowly learning to use oxygen to their advantage. A new kind of cell called a eukaryote began to populate the seas. Unlike cyanobacteria, which are basically just genetic material contained inside a membrane, a eukaryotic cell contains a nucleus packed with DNA as well as tiny Details ISBN0307949427 Author Annalee Newitz Short Title SCATTER ADAPT & REMEMBER Language English ISBN-10 0307949427 ISBN-13 9780307949424 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 576.84 Birth 1969 Year 2014 Subtitle How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction UK Release Date 2014-04-08 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2014-04-08 NZ Release Date 2014-04-08 US Release Date 2014-04-08 Pages 320 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2014-04-08 Imprint Anchor Books Illustrations 20 ILLUS. IN TEXT Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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