Caveat to everything below: Bryson’s book was written in 2003, so more than 20 years ago. Perhaps the previous “unknowns” he outlines in his book that I discuss are now “knowns,” or there exists more context for the long-established “knowns.” I tried to Google where I could to verify certain information.
All life is one. That is perhaps the best shorthand way to describe not only the “history of nearly everything,” but the lesson for humans as the custodians of life. Quite the responsibility, when you think about it! In Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he explains in exhaustive detail through most major scientific disciplines the plain fact that we — all living things — are lucky to be here.
Similar to his later book I recently listened to and reviewed, 2019’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bryson is interested in discovery. How does discovery happen and what’s going on with the people behind the discovery? When do the ideas become accepted? Do the people behind them ever receive recognition since, as he notes, the Nobel Prize does not get awarded posthumously? The number of times great discoveries and leaps in human knowledge come because of sheer luck, happenstance, and seeming intuition — as in, literally thinking through a problem rather than there necessarily being a tangible lab-produced, or other evidence-based way of arriving at an idea — while also often being met with derision from the scientific community at large, if it was even acknowledged to begin with, or the great idea sat in a drawer for 15 years, is remarkable to consider. My other takeaway from Bryson’s penetrating (and acerbic wit) about the people behind discovery is that scientists ought to write more clearly, not only for other scientists, but for the public at large, if they do want their ideas to be widely disseminated! It’s rather dismaying the number of scientists Bryson covers who had no interest in communicating clearly.
Certainly, one of the great, if not the greatest, scientists who tried to “figure things out” was Isaac Newton. So much flowed from his brain, including implications from his universal law of gravitation that weren’t conceived of yet, such as the earth not being perfectly round (it’s more like ellipsoid because of the bulging effect created by spinning). Oh, and in his spare time, he invented calculus. But it’s also interesting to consider, as Bryson does with many of these scientists, what would have been possible if they, including Newton, weren’t so preoccupied with the weirdest, esoteric, and niche things. For Newton it was alchemy and religion. If he had spent less time on those pursuits and even more on science, what more could that brain have figured out? We will never know. Another of these “great men of science” is, of course, Albert Einstein. If any scientist could have just one of the ideas he had in 1905, much less the three (I believe) he had, all while working in a Swiss Patent Office, they would be elated. In that year, often considered his “miracle year,” he banged out his famous space and time equation, E=mc², explained photons, and Brownian motion, giving us the atomic theory of matter. Bryson says one of these ideas (I’m forgetting which!) is considered by some to be the greatest singular idea in human history. The only other person and idea who gets that treatment from Bryson is Charles Darwin and evolution through natural selection. (Googling, Newton, Einstein, and Darwin are all on the list for their ideas, but of course, there’s also the soft sciences, which I’d love a companion book giving a short history of nearly everything as it concerns the soft sciences. Some argue that the concept of democracy is the greatest human idea ever.)
Discovery doesn’t flow in a neat, coherent line either. One of my new favorite “fun facts” from Bryson is that we could split the atom and had television before we fully understood the age of the earth. Obviously, at some point, smart people looked around and were like, these processes would have taken such a long time, that our preconceived notion of how old the earth is must be wrong. But to actually ascertain the earth’s age, and have it widely accepted, didn’t happen until the late 1950s. I didn’t know that was so recent! Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. I just marvel at the fact that we can figure that out.
Throughout the book, Bryson goes through astronomy, geology, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on, and it is always interesting the rivalry that exists between the disciplines, especially hundreds of years ago, when certain scientific disciplines were considered more properly elite. Chemistry was interesting, too, because of how disorganized it was compared to the others for the longest time. Thankfully, in the 19th century, Dmitri Mendeleev came along and gave us the framework for the periodic table of elements. I need a movie about him and his mother, Maria. She took him from Siberia to Moscow, which is more than 2,000 miles, to ensure his education, and then promptly died. What a great mother!
Bryson struggles with the two concepts I struggle with every time I put my brain to it: 1.) How did all of this come out of nothing? and 2.) Again, how did humans eventually start figuring things out, like the age of the earth (he spends considerable time on this), or the existence of atoms and genes? To stay on the latter still, I think it’s also worth considering that for all of human history, even our present day, those who are devoted to “figuring things out” constitute a minority of the population. In other words, all of us are the benefactors of a few people who dared to (quite literally, too, as some people risked their livelihoods and lives for scientific progress and knowledge), and were capable of (not just in terms of knowledge, but were not living in abject poverty like most for most of human history), figuring things out. To add to the capable point, people talk about how war has led to scientific advancements, such as radar, jet engines, computers, etc. (although, you wonder, how long would it have taken us to create such things sans war?), but what they don’t talk about and which Bryson mentions a few times throughout the book, is how war and conquest disrupted and stifled scientific advancements. How much sooner would we have figured and developed certain ideas and advanced without war and conquest getting in the way?
Back to the former, how is all of this here? Everything is just right for us. Contemplating the cosmos is both a.) something humans are clearly capable of doing as we know more about it than the deepest reaches of the floors of our own oceans; and b.) beyond our capacity to truly imagine the scale of everything, particularly distance. My main takeaway from much of the space portions of the book is that space is really, really empty. That emptiness, which enables the distance problem, helps us because it protects us from supernova explosions, as an example, but it presents challenges to us because everything is so damn distant!
You’ve likely heard this before, but Bryson narrows down four reasons for our existence:
- Our location in the cosmos is the precise distance necessary from the sun to sustain life.
- The earth itself with its molten core allows for an atmosphere to protect us (the magnetic field).
- The moon being a companion planet that steadies our tilt and provides the tides, among other things. (Notably, Bryson said in 2 billion years, the moon will drift too far from us, thus no longer steadying us on our axis. Ope.)
- Timing, which he said was perhaps most crucial. The most salient, obvious example is that if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, enabling the rise of mammals, then we wouldn’t be here.
I don’t want to gloss over the aforementioned splitting of the atom. Just as the cosmos is difficult to understand at its scale and scope, it’s also unfathomable to truly grasp the scale and scope of the molecular world (much less the quantum!) and all the processes that are going on to keep us and everything around us alive. Similar to the vast emptiness of space, there is a lot of emptiness at the molecular level, too, so much so that nothing is ever “really” touching. Bryson’s example is that as I’m typing this while sitting on a chair, at the molecular level, I’m not literally sitting on the chair. I’m levitating. That’s because of the empty space between atoms. As Bryson mentioned in The Body, we’re just recycled atoms here at the behest of bacteria. We need them more than they need us. We also really, really need that rather peculiar substance known as water, peculiar because it doesn’t behave as it ought to (its polarity and being a universal solvent, among other attributes). Yet, most of the water available to us on earth is toxic: it’s salty!
The fun caveat to all of this Bryson mentioned is that everything is just right for us so far. One day, gravity could collapse the universe, for example. Lovely!
Consider even my existence as a singular math problem. Bryson says my parents had to couple at the exactly right nanosecond to create me. Then, so did my parents’ parents and their parents, and so on. At a certain point, you’re talking about millions of people coupling at the right nanosecond. Go back to the Romans, and it’s one million trillion. Wait, the math doesn’t work. That’s more than the number of humans who have ever existed on earth, Bryson says. The answer to such a math riddle: incest. At some level, the human race really is one big family. Another lovely thought!
But let’s go back to the geological scale of the earth and all of human history. Bryson asks us to imagine earth’s history as one earth day. The first microbes came onto the scene around 4 a.m., and then … nothing for the next 16 hours. Then, some seed plants, jellyfish, and the nasty-looking trilobites (marine arthropods) emerge. Just before 10 p.m., plants go on land. Big forests develop 20 minutes later, along with insects. Just before 11 p.m., dinosaurs dominate the scene. At 20 minutes to midnight, they go extinct allowing for the aforementioned rise of mammals. Finally, all of human history, everything we’ve ever known as a species, gets its start 1 minute and 17 seconds before midnight. Another way to imagine it, Bryson says, is to extend your arms out. If the earth’s processes started at your right fingertip and moved across to your left, all of human history would start at your left nail cuticle. To put it just one more way, those trilobites existed for 300 million years. We are at half a percent as long as that. It is rather remarkable that we even have fossils at all, given the destruction and careless that we’ve caused on the earth, and just the nature of fossils in general (they have to be created in a rather specific way!). I always assumed we had bountiful dinosaur fossils, but Bryson says even those are rare and there is a great deal we simply do not know about the dinosaurs. As a matter of fact, throughout earth’s existence, there have been 30 billion species, but only 250,000 of them exist in the fossil record. Most of those are marine. As fascinating as that all is, the only portion of the book I found to be too much in the weeds as to be a slog was this section about the Cambrian explosion, resulting in major animals appearing in the fossil record (Chapter 21).
Just as there exist many external variables that could end life as we know it in a flash, there are also many variables on earth itself that could kill us. That’s the other side of the “earth is perfect for sustaining life” coin: earth in so many ways is inhospitable to life and it’s rather amazing life exists on it at all, much less complex and conscious life. The volcanic system under Yellowstone in the United States is the classic example people use, including Bryson in the book. It’s considered “overdue” to explode since it tends to explode every 600,000 years and the last explosion waas 640,000 years ago. In fact, Bryson argues that we know very little about what goes on beneath our feet, as it were, and that we understand the interior of the sun better than we do the interior of the earth. That’s another fun fact to add to my list!
Which, as breathtaking as so many of the discoveries manifest by humans are, the unknowns are just as compelling. There is much we do not know. As just a few more examples throughout the book, we don’t know much about the blue whale, the biggest creature earth has ever produced. We don’t know how many different things actually live on our planet. Interestingly, 99 percent of plants have never been tested for their medicinal benefits. And of course, may never be if we accidently cleared them out before they can be tested. Perhaps, though, the most fascinating unknown is the one most pertinent to us: ascertaining our own “start” as humans. When, where exactly, and why did Homo sapiens become the dominant species? What happened to the Neanderthals? How did people get to Australia 60,000 years ago, presumably without speech to help organize such an effort? Why did our ancient ancestors obsessively create so many ineffective stone axes?
Toward the end of his book, Bryson expands more upon our destructive power as a species, often for no real purpose other than because we could. He finds it sad and a great loss for the earth when we kill off a species, like the dodo, which, it’s interesting the bird has never actually existed in our lifetimes, but there’s an emoji for it! The dodo was discovered in the 1600s and within 80 years, we killed it off. Another one we poofed out of existence in the 1700s was the sea cow. I’d never heard of it, but from Googling, it’s rather neat. Finally, there’s the Carolina parakeet, a beautiful bird, with reportedly a lovely song. The last one to exist on earth died in my local zoo, as a matter of fact, in 1918, and the zoo even lost that one after it was stuffed. Because of our existence and our ways, Bryson argues the earth has also become more diminutive. There are only four giant animals (on land, that is) left: elephants, rhinos, hippos, and giraffes. That is a great loss. On the other hand, we do need to exist! Couldn’t you argue that, even if humans had never intentionally hunted an animal out of existence (for sport, at least), a great many animals would still have gone extinct and be going extinct by virtue of our existence?
Indeed, Bryson makes a bold statement: If you had to choose, you wouldn’t choose us to take care of other animals, both the ones still alive and as stewards of the ones dead in terms of fossils and such. I find that rather cynical. Yes, we’ve wrought a lot of destruction of other species and the earth itself throughout our existence, including into modern times. But I take solace in that we have the capability to make it better given our consciousness and awareness. Indeed, the richer and better off as a species we’ve gotten, we’ve started doing just that. Heck, that we can even agitate for such stewardship is a remarkable feat, given how improbable our existence is.
Bryson’s lesson, in the end, is quoting another scientist who said: one planet, one experiment. We, as in all life on earth, are lucky to be here, and humans are doubly lucky to have that aforementioned consciousness. However, we need more than the series of lucky breaks we’ve gotten up to this point to maintain it. I, for one, will always bet on human ingenuity to augment any luck that comes our way.
Milam's Musings 