by Bill Bryson
The essential dilemmas of being human – the contrast between the stellar near-immortalities we see in our night sky, and our own all-too-soon, solitary extinctions – are now even more dramatically the stuff of everyday experience. We now know what a small sliver we inhabit in the long parade of our universe. Who can glimpse these perspectives and not reflect on our mortality? We are mayflies. Yet we now know enough of time and our place in it to reflect upon truly immense issues.
Time is a fundamental, its nature slowly glimpsed. After all this time, we do not fully understand it.
Here, on the level sand
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
– A.E. Housman
EPILOGUE
It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that cosmologists and evolutionists must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. I conclude with a ‘cosmic perspective’ which actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.
The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are, through the work of Darwin and the geologists, now part of common culture. But most people still regard humans as necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to an astronomer. Our Sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporising whatever remains on Earth. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, ‘eternity is very long, especially towards the end’.
Any creatures witnessing the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human – they’ll be as different from us as we are from bacteria. As Charles Darwin himself recognised, ‘not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity’. Post-human evolution – here on Earth and far beyond – could be as prolonged as the Darwinian evolution that’s led to us – and even more wonderful. Life from this planet could spread through the entire Galaxy, evolving into a teeming complexity beyond what we can conceive.
However, even in this ‘concertinaed’ timeline – extending billions of years into the future, as well as into the past – the present century may be a defining moment. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could not only jeopardise itself but foreclose life’s immense potential.
Suppose some aliens had been watching our planet for its entire history, what would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, 4.5 billion years, Earth’s appearance would have altered very gradually. The continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct.
But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth’s history – the last one millionth part, a few thousand years – the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signalled the start of agriculture. The pace of change accelerated as human populations rose.
Then there were other changes, even more abrupt. Within fifty years, little more than one hundredth of a millionth of the Earth’s age, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise anomalously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves (the total output from all TV, cell-phone and radar transmissions). And something else unprecedented happened: small projectiles launched from the planet’s surface and escaped the biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around the Earth; some journeyed to the Moon and planets.
If they understood astrophysics, the aliens could confidently predict that the biosphere would face doom in a few billion years when the Sun flares up and dies. But could they have predicted this unprecedented ‘fever’ less than halfway through the Earth’s life?
If they continued to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a runaway spasm be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself stabilise? And will some of the objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?
The outcome depends on us. Wise choices will require the idealistic and effective efforts of natural scientists, environmentalists, social scientists and humanists – aided by the insights that twenty-first-century science will surely bring.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
A
Acharius, Erik, 196
action principles, 101
Adams, George, 140, 153
aerodynamics, 358
Aeschnogomphus, 185
$$ther, 65
Agricola, Georgius, De Re Metallica, 303
airflow, analysis of, 357–58
alchemists, 39, 91, 124
Alecto Historical Editions, 191
algebra:
abstract, 356
Boolean, 349, 350–51 and Internet communications, 356
linear, 356
Ammann, Othmar, 246
Ancient Monuments Protection Act (1882), 14
Andromeda, 326, 327
apocalypse:
climate change and, 408, 417, 418–19
in fiction, 406–12, 415–17
human longing for, 412–15
Hyde Park speakers on, 413
impact events, 407
nuclear, 408, 408
personal survival in, 420–23
Apollo space programme, 271
Arbuthnot, John, 48
archaeology, 5, 197
Archaeopteryx, 186–88, 187, 191, 192, 201
Argentinean ant, 282, 283
Aristotelian worldview, 90, 111, 114, 119, 298
Aristotle, 85, 469
empiricism of, 114, 119, 121, 298
and laws of syllogism, 115
on motion, 110, 117, 127
Posterior Analytics, 115
on space and time, 64, 71
view of the cosmos, 109
“Ark, The,” Lambeth, 197
Arlandes, Marquis d’, 159, 169
art:
geometric figuring, 71
landscape, 392, 393, 400
linear perspective in, 71
medieval, 67, 68, 69
Renaissance, 71
Ashmole, Elias, 197
Ashmolean Museum, 197–98
Astbury, Bill, 256, 257, 258
Asteroid 2008 TC3, 401–2
astrobiology, 328
astronomy, 469, 474, 478
and Copernican principle, 323
Earth seen via, 388–89, 401
astrophysicists, 469
Atacama Desert, 331
Athill, Diana, Towards the End, 410, 415
Atiyah, Michael, 482
atomism, 91–92, 93, 123–24
Aubert, Alexander, 172
Aubrey, John, 5, 28
Augustine, Saint, 463
B
Bacon, Francis, 111, 112, 299, 468
death of, 120
empiricism of, 113, 120, 121–22, 123, 128, 301,476
followers of, 127, 317, 319
Instauratio Magna, 299
“knowledge is power,” 297, 314, 317
The New Atlantis, 300, 309, 309
Novum Organum, 299, 299
on practical science, 296, 299–301, 302, 310,315
Bacon, Roger, 70–71, 298
Bak, Per, 381
Bakelite, 310, 311
Baker, Benjamin, 239
Baldwin, Thomas, Aeropaedia, 170n
ballooning, 158–65
demagogic potential of, 160–61
fashion accessories for, 160
first crossing of English Channel, 176, 179
first manned flight, 158–59, 163, 169
first scientific record of, 175
hot-air, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 179
hydrogen
, 158, 159, 160, 161, 169, 174, 179
letters to and from Banks about, 166, 167,168–69
and navigation, 172–76
practical uses for, 170–72, 180
Le Tableau de Paris, 161, 163
Banks, Joseph, 13, 137, 148, 168
and ballomania, 158–61, 163, 166–71, 172–76 178, 181
Banks’ Florilegium, 191
botanical collections of, 190–92, 195, 198
on the Endeavour, 189–91
and Heckingham lightning rods, 140, 150, 152
Scientific Correspondence, 166
Barbour, Julian, The Discovery of Dynamics, 99
Barlow, Peter, 237
Barnes, Julian, Nothing to be Frightened of, 416, 417
Barrington, Daines, 193, 195
Barthes, Roland, 310, 311, 312
Baxter, Raymond, 264
Bayes, Rev Thomas, 2–3, 9
Bayesian inference on climate change, 433–34, 435
letter regarding logarithms, 4, 5
Bayes Theorem, 2–3
Beaman, S. G. Hulme, 52
Bell, Thomas, 221
Bergmann, Torbern, 304
Bernal, John Desmond, 253, 258–60, 258, 263, 268, 270, 271
The Social Function of Science, 259
on weapons of mass destruction, 259
The World, the Flesh and the Devil, 259
Berthollet, Claude, 161
Bessemer, Henry, 303–4, 304, 306
beta lactam ring, 262
Bethe, Hans, 482, 483
Bhagavad Gita, 462–63
big bang, 326, 329, 338, 463, 470, 472
biodiversity, 196, 274–79
and accident, 277–78, 286, 293
and community structure, 287–89, 290
and extinction, 280, 283, 461, 480–81
and food webs, 288
inherited, 278
and invasive species, 280, 282, 283
invention of the term, 279
on islands, 277–78, 289
and loss of habitat, 283
measurement of, 285–87
necessity vs. chance in, 278–79
and predation, 288–89
and randomness, 289–93
species concept of, 284–85
threatened, 279–81, 283–84, 480–81
bioengineering, 317
biogenesis, 333, 335
biology, synthetic, 319
biosphere, endurance of, 391
biotechnology, 154, 314–17
Birch, Thomas, 30
Black, Joseph, 160
black holes, 455, 458–59, 460
Blagden, Charles:
and ballooning, 160–61, 167, 168, 171, 172
and Heckingham lightning rods, 138, 148, 149, 150, 152
Blake, William, 79
Blanchard, Jean-Pierre, 159, 160, 172, 173, 174–76
Blyth, Edward, 206, 208, 219
Bobbitt, John, 138, 144, 148
body and soul, dualism of, 65
Boole, George, 344, 345, 349–51
Boolean algebra, 349, 350–51
Laws of Thought, 349, 350
botanical gardens, 189, 191–92, 195, 198, 275
Boulton, Matthew, 172
Boyle, Robert, 10, 23, 24, 111, 112, 189, 300, 301, 468
on chemistry, 123–24, 125, 128
critics of, 119n
experiments by, 21, 22, 29–30, 31
and Newton, 33
Boyle’s Law, 378
Boylston, Zabdiel, 48
Bragg, William Henry, 253–55, 254, 260
Bragg, William Lawrence, 253–55, 254, 256–57, 258, 263, 264, 266, 268, 271
Bragg’s Law, 254
Brenner, Sydney, 267
bridges, 230–49
aesthetic appeal of, 246, 247–48, 248–49
arch design, 231, 238
cable-stayed, 248–49
cantilever structure, 239, 239, 241
collapses of, 238–39, 240, 241, 245, 245, 303
designs of today, 245–49
hybrid cantilever-suspension, 241–42, 244
moving in the wind, 245
“signature,” 249
structural tests of, 233–35
suspension, 231, 238, 241, 243–45, 248
testing trends of behaviour, 234
trusswork of, 241, 244
tubular, 238
Britannia Tubular Bridge, 232–35
failure of, 237–38
group portrait of engineers for, 235–36, 236, 237, 238, 249
British Museum, 191
British Museum Act (1753), 199
Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, 246, 247
Brook, Abraham, 139, 152, 153
Brooklyn Bridge, 241, 246
Brouncker, William, 2nd Viscount, 21, 22, 26
Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 237, 238, 319
Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 27
Buckland, William, 196
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, clock, 408
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 12
C
calculus, 352–53
fluxional, 127
origins of, 86, 89, 105, 348, 359
Canada goose, 282, 283
cancer treatments, 434
Canton, John, 5
carbon, 329, 395
Carlin, George, 391
Carnot, Sadi, 457
Caro, Anthony, 247
Caroline, Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 86, 89
causality, 129
cause and effect, laws of, 363
Cavallo, Tiberius, 177
A Treatise on the History and Practice of Aerostation, 176, 178–80
Cavendish, Henry, 136, 137, 145, 160, 172, 174–75
celestial vs. terrestrial realm, 65–66, 69, 72, 80
Celestine Prophecy, The (Redfield), 79
cellular automata, 97–98
celluloid, 310–11
cellulose nitrate (gun cotton), 311
CERN, 271, 318
Cernan, Gene, 386
chaos, 377–79, 381–83
Chao Tang, 381
Charles, Alexander, 158, 161, 169, 173
Charles II, king of England, 3, 47, 301
Chartres, Duke of, 167
Chelsea Physic Garden, 198, 200, 201
chemistry:
Boyle on, 123–24, 125, 128
experimentation in, 124
chess, robotic intelligence in, 477–78
Chester & Holyhead Railway, 231–32
Churchill, Winston, 442
Cicerone, Ralph, 431
Civil Engineering, 247
Clarke, Arthur C., 389
Clarke, Samuel, Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, 86, 89–90, 93, 97
Clausius, Rudolf, 457
Clement IV, Pope, 70
climate, vs. weather, 427
climate change, 293
and apocalypse, 408, 417, 418–19
Bayesian inference on, 433–34, 435
communicating to policy-makers, 430–31, 432, 435
Intergovernmental Panel on, 428, 434, 435–36, 437–41
modelling, 427–31, 429
risk assessment in, 435–41, 442–43
science of, 432
uncertainty in, 408, 426–27, 428–29, 437, 439, 441–43, 479–80
Climatic Research Unit, 134
cloning, 479
Coga, Arthur, 12
cognitio, 92
Cohn, Norman, 407
collections:
access to, 196, 198
diffusion of knowledge via, 198
funding of, 201
living vs., inert, 198–99
in museums, 187–92, 196–99, 201
open to paying customers, 197
ownership of, 197
in public domain, 199
science and, 181, 196, 201
Collier, Hon. John, 206
complexity:
and chaos, 377–79
organised, 379–81, 380, 382
<
br /> science of, 333
compossibility, 101–2
Compsognathus, 185
Computational Fluid Dynamics, 358
computers:
in digital photography, 354
as logic engines, 350, 351
science in, 97, 475, 477–78
Stepped Reckoner, 85
conception, assisted, 317
Condorcet, Marquis de, 166
Conference of Engineers at Britannia Bridge (Lucas), 235–36, 236, 237, 238, 249
continuity, 80
Conway, John, 473
Cook, Captain James, 6, 10, 135, 189
Cooper, Samuel, 139, 152
Copernican principle:
applied to laws, 372–73
in cosmology, 322–23, 324–31, 333–39
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 62, 66, 111, 112
followers of, 127
rationalism of, 113, 115, 122
and solar system, 116, 116, 322, 323
Copley Medal, 141, 141
coral reefs, 290
Cornelio, Tommaso, 32, 34–35
cosmological constant, 375
cosmology, 62, 64, 66–67, 322–39
Copernican principle in, 322–23, 324–31, 333–39
cosmos vs., 76
post-Newtonian space, 74–76
theological consequences of, 72–73, 109
and time, 462–63, 465, 474
Cotterill, Rodney, 307
Cowley, Abraham, The Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 301
Cox, Stephen, 14
Creation, dating of, 452
Creationism, 80
Crick, Francis, 264–65, 472
see also Watson/Crick
Cromwell, Oliver, 301
Croone, William, 26, 28
crystallography, 258, 260–61, 270, 271
Crystal Palace, 237
Cumberland, George, 159
cyberfiction, 80
D
Dale, Sir Henry, 257
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 64, 65, 81
Darwin, Charles, 134, 164, 207
and biodiversity, 275–79, 280, 289, 293
bridges crossed by, 219–22, 226
and evolution, 204–6, 208–24, 265, 275, 331–32, 449, 451, 461, 484
on missing link, 39
The Origin of Species, 186, 208, 210–11, 213–14, 216, 217, 220, 221, 274, 275, 276, 277, 293
as Royal Society member, 9
specimens collected by, 201, 281
and Wallace, 211–18, 221, 461
Darwin, Erasmus, 142, 206
and ballooning, 163, 166, 170, 171
The Loves of the Plants, 163–65
Zoonomia, 195
