kybusiness. Of t ed since time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Eart onlybrief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence t t is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguis.
ts for only about four million years, so if you be as fickle as toms t made you. You must beprepared to c yourself-sion,everyto do so repeatedly. ts muco get from quot;protoplasmal primordial atomic globulequot; (as t andSullivan song put it) to sentient uprigo mutate neraitsover and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long 3.8 billion years you ed on it, groy sails, laid eggs, flicked tongue, been sleek,been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse,and a million tiniest deviation from any of tionary ss, and youmigony sop of your y feet for amouthful of delicious sandworms.
Not only o be attacime immemorial to a favoredevolutionary line, but you remely-make t miraculously-fortunate in yourpersonal ancestry. Consider t t for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older tains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on bottractive enougo find a mate, o reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fateand circumstances to live long enougo do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors randed, stuck fast, untimely ed from its lifes quest of delivering a tiny cic material to tpartner at t moment in order to perpetuate tarycombinations t could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.
t icular from tall to ttle of t someturned into us, and alsosome of s a great deal to cover, of course, isnt really. Itcouldnt be. But ime is.
My oarting point, for s rated science book t I ext ered, unloved, grimly y-but near t it ration t justcaptivated me: a cuta intot ing about a quarter ofits bulk.
Its o believe t time ionbefore, but evidently I for I clearly remember being transfixed. I suspect, in y,my initial interest e image of streams of