A short history of nearly everything (66 page)

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 bookThe 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 inThe 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.

REFERENCES

References

*A word on scientific notation: Since very large numbers are cumbersome to write and nearly impossible to read, scientists use a shorthand involving powers (or multiples) of ten in which, for instance, 10,000,000,000 is written 1010 and 6,500,000 becomes 6.5 x 106. The principle is based very simply on multiples of ten: 10 x 10 (or 100) becomes 102; 10 x 10 x 10 (or 1,000) is 103; and so on, obviously and indefinitely. The little superscript number signifies the number of zeroes following the larger principal number. Negative notations provide latter in print (especially essentially a mirror image, with the superscript number indicating the number of spaces to the right of the decimal point (so 10-4 means 0.0001). Though I salute the principle, it remains an amazement to me that anyone seeing “1.4 x 109 km3’ would see at once that that signifies 1.4 billion cubic kilometers, and no less a wonder that they would choose the former over the in a book designed for the general reader, where the example was found. On the assumption that many general readers are as unmathematical as I am, I will use them sparingly, though they are occasionally unavoidable, not least in a chapter dealing with things on a cosmic scale.

[†]Properly called the Opik-Oort cloud, it is named for the Estonian astronomer Ernst Opik, who hypothesized its existence in 1932, and for the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who refined the calculations eighteen years later.

* Triangulation, their chosen method, was a popular technique based on the geometric fact that if you know the length of one side of a triangle and the angles of two corners, you can work out all its other dimensions without leaving your chair. Suppose, by way of example, that you and I decided we wished to know how far it is to the Moon. Using triangulation, the first thing we must do is put some distance between us, so let’s say for argument that you stay in Paris and I go to Moscow and we both look at the Moon at the same time. Now if you imagine a line connecting the three principals of this exercise-that is, you and I and the Moon-it forms a triangle. Measure the length of the baseline between you and me and the angles of our two corners and the rest can be simply calculated. (Because the interior angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, if you know the sum of two of the angles you can instantly calculate the third; and knowing the precise shape of a triangle and the length of one side tells you the lengths of the other sides.) This was in fact the method use by a Greek astronomer, Hipparchus of Nicaea, in 150 B.C. to work out the Moon’s distance from Earth. At ground level, the principles of triangulation are the same, except that the triangles don’t reach into space but rather are laid side to side on a map. In measuring a degree of meridian, the surveyors would create a sort of chain of triangles marching across the landscape.

[4]How fast you are spinning depends on where you are. The speed of the Earth’s spin varies from a little over 1,000 miles an hour at the equator to 0 at the poles.

[5]The next transit will be on June 8, 2004, with a second in 2012. There were none in the twentieth century.

[6]In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus.

[7]To a physicist, mass and weight are two quite different things. Your mass stays the same wherever you go, but your weight varies depending on how far you are from the center of some other massive object like a planet. Travel to the Moon and you will be much lighter but no less massive. On Earth, for all practical purposes, mass and weight are the same and so the terms can be treated as synonymous. at least outside the classroom.

[8]There will be no testing here, but if you are ever required to memorize them you might wish to remember John Wilford’s helpful advice to think of the eras (Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, an( Cenozoic) as seasons in a year and the periods (Permian, Triassic Jurassic, etc.) as the months.

[9]Although virtually all books find a space for him, there is a striking variability in the details associated with Ussher. Some books say he made his pronouncement in 1650, others in 1654, still others in 1664. Many cite the date of Earth’s reputed beginning as October 26. At least one book of note spells his name “Usher.” The matter is interestingly surveyed in Stephen Jay Gould’s Eight Little Piggies.

[10]Darwin loved an exact number. In a later work, he announced that the number of worms to be found in an average acre of English country soil was 53,767.

[11]In particular he elaborated the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A discussion of these laws would be a book in itself, but I offer here this crisp summation by the chemist P. W Atkins, just to provide a sense of them: “There are four Laws. The third of them, the Second Law, was recognized first; the first, the Zeroth Law, was formulated last; the First Law was second; the Third Law might not even be a law in the same sense as the others.” In briefest terms, the second la\\ states that a little energy is always wasted. You can’t have a perpetual motion device because no matter how efficient, it will always lose energy and eventually run down. The first law says that you can’t create energy and the third that you can’t reduce temperatures to absolute zero; there will always be some residual warmth. As Dennis Overbye notes, the three principal laws are sometimes expressed jocularly as (1) you can’t win, (2) you can’t break even, and (3) you can’t get out of the game.

[12]The notable exception being the Tyrannosaurus rex, which was found by Barnum Brown in 1902.

[13]The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose b cause of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy’s part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called italumium . For son reason he thought better of that and changed it toaluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but mai British users dislikedaluminum , pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and strontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

[14]The principle led to the much later adoption of Avogadro’s number, a basic unit of measure in chemistry, which was named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its value is placed at 6.0221367 x 1023, which is an enormously large number. Chemistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific Ocean, or soft drink cans that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to a depth of 200 miles. An equivalent number of American pennies would be enough to make every person on Earth a dollar trillionaire. It is a big number.

[15]Specifically it is a measure of randomness or disorder in a system. Darrell Ebbing, in the textbookGeneral Chemistry, very usefully suggests thinking of a deck of cards. A new pack fresh out of the box, arranged by suit and in sequence from ace to king, can be said to be in its ordered state. Shuffle the cards and you put them in a disordered state. Entropy is a way of measuring just how disordered that state is and of determining the likelihood of particular outcomes with further shuffles. Of course, if you wish to have any observations published in a respectable journal you will need also to understand additional concepts such as thermal nonuniformities, lattice distances, and stoichiometric relationships, but that’s the general idea.

[16]Planck was often unlucky in life. His beloved first wife died early, in 1909, and the younger of his two sons was killed in the First World War. He also had twin daughters whom he adored. One died giving birth. The surviving twin went to look after the baby and fell in love with her sister’s husband. They married and two years later she died in childbirth. In 1944, when Planck was eighty-five, an Allied bomb fell on his house and he lost everything-papers, diaries, a lifetime of accumulations. The following year his surviving son was caught in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.

[17]Einstein was honored, somewhat vaguely, “for services to theoretical physics.” He had to wait sixteen years, till 1921, to receive the award-quite a long time, all things considered, but nothing at all compared with Frederick Reines, who detected the neutrino in 1957 but wasn’t honored with a Nobel until 1995, thirty-eight years later, or the German Ernst Ruska, who invented the electron microscope in 1932 and received his Nobel Prize in 1986, more than half a century after the fact. Since Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously, longevity can be as important a factor as ingenuity for prizewinners.

[18]Howc came to be the symbol for the speed of light is something of a mystery, but David Bodanis suggests it probably came from the Latinceleritas , meaning swiftness. The relevant volume of theOxford English Dictionary , compiled a decade before Einstein’s theory, recognizesc as a symbol for many things, from carbon to cricket, but makes no mention of it as a symbol for light or swiftness.

[19]Named for Johann Christian Doppler, an Austrian physicist, who first noticed the effect in 1842. Briefly, what happens is that as a moving object approaches a stationary one its sound waves become bunched up as they cram up against whatever device is receiving them (your ears, say), just as you would expect of anything that is being pushed from behind toward an immobile object. This bunching is perceived by the listener as a kind of pinched and elevated sound (the yee). As the sound source passes, the sound waves spread out and lengthen, causing the pitch to drop abruptly (the yummm).

[20]The name comes from the same Cavendishes who producec Henry. This one was William Cavendish, seventh Duke of Devonshire, who was a gifted mathematician and steel baron in Victoriar England. In 1870, he gave the university £6,300 to build an experimental lab.

[21]Geiger would also later become a loyal Nazi, unhesitatingly betraying Jewish colleagues, including many who had helped him.

[22]There is a littleuncertainty about the use of the word uncertainty in regard to Heisenberg’s principle. Michael Frayn, in an afterword to his playCopenhagen , notes that several words in German-Unsicherheit, Unscharfe, Unbestimmtheit-have been used by various translators, but that none quite equates to the English uncertainty. Frayn suggests thatindeterminacy would be a better word for the principle andindeterminability would be better still.

[23]Or at least that is how it is nearly always rendered. The actual quote was: “It seems hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that He plays dice and uses ‘telepathic’ methods. . . is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”