It is one of the most difficult things in the world to pick up a book after staring at computers and newspapers for 8 hours a day. Evenings and weekends are better kept looking at other things, like trees, clouds, overgrown kittens, K, and yes, even TV. Basically, anything that doesn’t require thinking while using your eyes is fair game.
Never one to make my own life easier, I decided that my New Year’s resolution for 2006 would be to read a book a month. I think I’ve read 5 books this year, including the whole 800 pages of “Hitchhiker’s Guide” and, my most recent conquest, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”.
If you want to blow your mind while simultaneously feeling all-powerful and minuscule, this is the book for you. It explains pretty much everything we have come to lean and understand as a species, and how we came to know it. It accounts for every scientific discovery, from Newtonian to quantum physics, and from the largest distant sun to the smallest element of matter.
For example, the book explains that if you attached all of the tightly wound and very thin strands of DNA contained in each of the cells of one average person end to end, it would reach to the moon and back a couple of times, yet we still haven’t managed to explore the majority of life and surface area on our own planet. We know how the universe started (sort of) but we have no idea how humans as a species came to be. Basically, each chapter of the book goes a little like this: “this is what we do know, these people are arguing about this, and this is all the stuff we don’t have a clue about.” Naturally, the “stuff we don’t have a clue about” accounts for well over 50% of the content.
The most captivating and relevant section is about the world we currently live in, obviously the most advanced period for humans though our whole history as a species (from the time we descended from the trees), which only accounts for about 0.001% of the earth’s timeline, or something. To give an example of how quickly we evolved, pre-human sites have been found in Africa at which Cro-Magnons (pre-humans) basically spent a few millennia carrying stones over 10 miles to carve basic triangle shapes which they then left in organized piles over a large open plain – a “stone factory” that lasted for thousands of years, as described by the author. No actual use for the stones has been found, they just seem to have amused themselves by carving them. They also found the same shaped stones in Asia, Northern Europe, and Australia. By contrast, after we discovered how to write, it only took us about 3500 years to get to where we are now.
We’re a damned lucky bunch of meat sacks, by the way. Our climate, a major factor in our ability to advance to level we are at, is overdue for an ice age, and we aren’t even sure how quickly or slowly it will come. We are beating the historic odds in terms of catastrophic meteor events and volcanic activity. Oxygen levels are decreasing slowly, as they have been since the creation of the atmosphere. Past ice ages, it is speculated, have been caused by changes in the salt levels in the ocean. If the ocean is not salty enough, it will start to freeze and bounce back the sun’s rays, affecting water and air currents, and natural greenhouse gas level. Much of Europe and the US are kept warm because of these fragile currents.
I could go on, but you’d be better served by reading the book. And when you do, think about the huge destructive effect that humanity has had on our fragile, unique, small, blue planet. Compare that with the wonders of creation we’ve thought up, like the symphonies of Beethoven, renaissance art, the pyramids, or whatever else you happen to love for its aesthetic quality (Star Wars saga?).
But chew on this, whether we destroy the planet, or nature does it for us, all traces of our existence will be long gone before the conditions are right for life to emerge again, human or otherwise, and if we are remembered at all, it will be as a small blip in history.
Have a nice weekend!
D.
