A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
9/20/07
If you needed a refresher from middle school earth science and wanted to know what happened since then, Bill Bryson has got you covered; this time with a bit more depth and insight than would be appreciated by a 12 year old. Via his witty style of prose Bryson takes us back to the creation of the universe and brings us right up to how we got to today, and how amazingly lucky the journey was and at the same time how modern science really has no clue at all as to how it all happened or what happens next. There is a great deal of theory though, and a review of it is both astounding and at times discomforting.
The simple outline of the book proceeds though the following topics explaining what we know, who figured it out, how they figured it out, and many times, what’s more to figure out:
The Creation and history of the Universe
The size of the Earth
Atoms and stuff
The forces that make the Earth go
Life
Human history
Throughout the book Bryson does an amazing job of quantifying the unquantifiable. Starting with the creation of the universe and then into the size and nature of the earth. It is safe to say that the universe is bigger that you can understand and older than you can imagine. While I knew there were tons of microbes all over and in me, I didn’t really appreciate that there are more of them on me than cells in me. The book is full of these relational facts. In one case Bryson breaks the history of the earth down to what it would have looked like in one day’s time; humans don’t show up until the last instant of the day. Then the discussion of how we figured out chemistry is shocking, but fairly expected, folks just tried stuff out to see what was what, sometimes it killed them, and sometimes it didn’t. “All life is one” is the theme of DNA. We are 99.9% similar to everyone else and share many traits via DNA with plants and the like. We all come from this lifeless substance that we are all ultimately a slave too.
On the topic of our existence, it is amazing that we, humans, are not the point of it all, as many easily imagine. We’re awfully lucky to be here and we might not stick around forever. Bryson takes us through all the possibilities of how we as humans managed to get here. It seems the only thing that can be agreed upon is that we are awfully lucky to have made it. Throughout the book descriptions of what could have happened along the way are shocking.
Here are some of the ways that we could all go away, tomorrow. An asteroid could hit the planet. Apparently there are several close calls a week, but we can’t see them, the dark roids just sail right by. Think about it, there isn’t a telescope pointed in every direction, we are bound to miss a great deal of this. And if a big one hit, we’re gone. If not an asteroid, a huge volcanic eruption could take us all out. It is well argued that we are overdue for that. It is also well argued that either the asteroid or the volcano did the dinosaurs in, so, safe to say, it could happen. How about a big solar flare frying us with some radiation, certainly a possibility? And then on a small scale, a bacteria or virus could quite easily bring us to our knees, if you think about it, and what you recall about various plagues over history, we might be overdue there too.
What drives science today is thought provoking: we know so much, but at the same time, know so little. Where do you start? Where do you get the money? Do drug companies want to fight life long illness where you have to take a pill a day for life, or flu where you take a pill for a couple of weeks? How do you standardize everything? How can you look at all parts of the sky? How do you catch up, all the mosses are still in paper record, not electronic (mosses while trivial are used as an example that could be applied to a great many things that need categorizing)? Now that we have mapped a human genome, what can we do with it? Science, in my mind, expands as fast as we can figure a small part of it out. Indeed, there is so much to figure out, let’s hope another ice age or asteroid doesn’t ruin the search.
