{"product_id":"scatter-adapt-and-remember-isbn-9780307949424","title":"Scatter, Adapt, and Remember","description":"\u003cb\u003eA\u003ci\u003e Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e Book Prize Finalist in Science \u0026amp; Technology\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. \u003ci\u003eScatter, Adapt, and Remember\u003c\/i\u003e explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow, from simulating tsunamis or studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities, to cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” or designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever our future holds.“Terrific. . . . A whirlwind tour of geology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and human history, as Newitz catalogs the terrifying disasters, catastrophes and genocides of geology and antiquity. . . . It’s a refreshingly grand sweep for a popular science book. . . . This is a delight of a book, balanced on the knife-edge of disaster and delirious hope.”\u003cbr\u003e—Cory Doctorow, \u003ci\u003eBoing Boing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Fascinating. . . . [Newitz is] an excellent writer, with an effortless style. . . . The inner science geek in all of us will uncover some really cool stuff. . . . A terrific book that covers an astounding amount of ground in a manageable 300 pages. Newitz has done all the mental heavy lifting, all the hard work and research, and presented it so you get to enjoy it in a few days or weeks of fun reading. You will be smarter for it.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Few things are more enjoyable than touring the apocalypse from the safety of your living room. Even as \u003ci\u003eScatter, Adapt, and Remember\u003c\/i\u003e cheerfully reminds us that asteroid impacts, mega-volcanos and methane eruptions are certain to come, it suggests how humankind can survive and even thrive. Yes, Annalee Newitz promises, the world will end with a bang, but our species doesn’t have to end with a whimper. \u003ci\u003eScatter, Adapt, and Remember\u003c\/i\u003e is a guide to Homo sapiens’ next million years. I had fun reading this book and you will too.”\u003cbr\u003e—Charles Mann, author of \u003ci\u003e1491\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “One of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long, long time—and perhaps the only one that takes such a clear-eyed view of the future.”\u003cbr\u003e—Seth Mnookin, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Panic Virus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Keen research and clear writing. . . . Sometimes, a brilliant observer can make an end run around what appears endless scientific quibbling daubed with politics.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Buffalo News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eScatter, Adapt, and Remember\u003c\/i\u003e is a refreshingly optimistic and well thought out dissection of that perennial worry: the coming apocalypse. While everyone else stridently shouts about the end of days, this book asks and answers a simple question: ‘If it’s so bad, then why are we still alive?’ I found myself in awe of the incredible extinction events that humankind—and life in general—has already survived, and Newitz inspires us with engaging arguments that our race will keep reaching the end of the world and then keep living through it. \u003ci\u003eScatter, Adapt, and Remember\u003c\/i\u003e intimately acquaints the reader with our two-hundred-thousand-year tradition of survival—nothing less than our shared heritage as human beings.”\u003cbr\u003e—Daniel H. Wilson, author of \u003ci\u003eRobopocalypse\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAmped\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book is not a survivalist guide but rather a grand historical overview that puts humanity in the middle of its evolution, with fascinating looks both back and forward in time. An enormous amount of knowledge is gathered here, and the book accomplishes something almost impossible, being extremely interesting on every single page. A real pleasure to read and think about.”\u003cbr\u003e—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An animated and absorbing account into how life has survived mass extinctions so far . . . and what we need to do to make sure humans don’t perish in the next one. . . . Humans may be experts at destroying the planet, but we are no slouches at preserving it, either, and Newitz’s shrewd speculations are heartening.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Newitz’s voice is fervent and earnest, and despite her gloomy topic, she leaves readers with hope for a long future.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eAnnalee Newitz is the founding editor of the science Web site io9.com and a journalist with a decade’s experience in writing about science, culture, and the future for such publications as \u003ci\u003eWired\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePopular Science\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. She is the editor of the anthology \u003ci\u003eShe’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Geeky Stuff\u003c\/i\u003e and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in San Francisco.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the hardcover edition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e1. The Apocalypse That Brought Us to Life\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you think that  humans are destroying the planet in a way that’s historically  unprecedented, you’re suffering from a species-level delusion of  grandeur. We’re not even the first creatures to pollute the Earth so  much that other creatures go extinct. Weirdly, it turns out that’s a  good thing. If it hadn’t been for a bunch of upstart microbes causing an  environmental apocalypse over 2 billion years ago, human beings and our  ancestors never would have evolved. Indeed, Earth’s history is full of  apocalyptic scenarios where mass death leads to new kinds of life. To  appreciate how these strange catastrophes work, we’ll have to travel  back in time to our planet’s beginnings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion–540 million years ago): Oxygen Apocalypse\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEarth  is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and for most of its life the  atmosphere would have been noxious for humans and all the creatures who  live here now. Vast acidic oceans roiled in what today’s environmental  scientists would call an extreme greenhouse climate: the air was  superheated and filled with methane and carbon. Our planet’s surface,  now covered in cool water and crusty soil, was bubbling with magma. The  solar system had formed relatively recently, and chunks of rock hurtled  between the young planets—often landing on them with fiery explosions.  (One such impact on Earth was so enormous, and threw off so much debris,  that it formed the Moon.) It was on this poisonous, inhospitable world  that life began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAbout 2.5 billion years ago, early in an eon  that geologists call the Proterozoic, a few hardy microbes who could  breathe in this environment drifted to the surface of the oceans. These  microbes, called cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae), knit themselves  into wrinkled mats of vegetation. They looked like black, frothy coats  of slime on the water, trailing long, feathery tendrils beneath the  waves. All that remains of this primordial ooze are enigmatic fossils  that hide inside a distinctive type of ancient, spherical rock called a  stromatolite. If you slice a stromatolite down the middle, you’ll see  thin, dark lines curving across its inner surface like the whorls in a  fingerprint—these are all that remain of those algal mats. Only a few  people in the world would recognize them as the traces of impossibly old  life that they are, and Roger Summons is one of them. He’s a  geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has spent  decades studying the origins of life on Earth, as well as the extinction  events that wipe it out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn Australian with a dry sense of  humor, Summons has an office you can only reach by walking through his  lab, a big, airy room full of tanks of hydrogen and bulky mass  spectrometers that look like old-school Xerox machines covered in tubes.  When I visited him to talk about ancient Earth, he plucked some slices  of stromatolite from the top of a filing cabinet to show me the traces  of algae that spidered across their surfaces. “This one is eight hundred  million years old, and this one is two-point-four billion,” he said,  pointing at each ragged half sphere of rock. “Oh, and this one is  probably three billion years old, but it’s a crap sample.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven  with a “crap sample,” Summons can pin a date on the fossils of creatures  who lived more than 2 billion years ago by examining the sediments that  have preserved them. In his lab, researchers grind up ancient rocks,  subjecting them to vacuum, freezing, lasers, and a strong magnetic field  before running them through the mass spectrometers. At that point,  often nothing remains of a stromatolite but ionized gas. And that’s  exactly what mass spectrometers need to decode the atoms in each sample.  Atoms in minerals decay at a fixed rate, and reading the state of a  rock’s atoms can tell scientists how long it has been since it formed.  Geologists don’t put fossils themselves beneath the laser. They use  machines like the ones in Summons’s lab to figure out the ages of the  rocks next to the fossils. Call it dating by association.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKnowing  when the oldest stromatolites were created helps us date an event which  changed Earth forever. The mats of algae that became stromatolites  weren’t just methane-loving scum. They were also filling the atmosphere  with a gas that was deadly to them: oxygen. This is how the first  environmental disaster on Earth began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust like plants today,  ancient blue-green algae nourished themselves using photosynthesis, a  molecular process that converts light and water into chemical energy.  Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to evolve photosynthesis, and  they did it by absorbing photons from sunlight and water molecules from  the ocean. Water molecules are made up of three atoms—two hydrogen atoms  and one oxygen atom (hence the chemical formula H2O). To nourish  themselves, the algae used photons to smash water molecules apart,  taking the hydrogen to use as an energy source and releasing the oxygen  molecules. This proved to be such a winning adaptation to Earth’s  primordial environment that cyanobacteria spread across the face of the  planet, eventually exhaling enough oxygen to set off a cascade of  chemical processes that leached methane and other greenhouse gases from  the atmosphere. The dominant form of life on Earth ultimately released  so much oxygen that it changed the climate dramatically, soon  extinguishing most of the life-forms that thrived in a carbon-rich  atmosphere. Today we worry that cow farts are destroying the environment  with methane; back in the Proterozoic, it’s certain that algae farts  ruined it with oxygen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGreenhouse Becomes Icehouse (and Vice Versa)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat  happened after the rise of oxygen was an event shrouded in mystery  until the late 1980s, when a Caltech geologist named Joe Kirschvink  asked his student Dawn Sumner to research a rock whose existence seemed  to be impossible—at least, given the prevailing theories about early  Earth. Found near the equator, the rock’s surface was scored with marks  that suggested it had once been scraped by the weight of a slow-moving  glacier. In a short paper that eventually revolutionized geologists’  understanding of climate change, Kirschvink suggested that this rock  offered a window on a late-Proterozoic phenomenon he called Snowball  Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSnowball Earth is what happens when our planet’s climate  enters a very extreme “icehouse” state, the opposite of a greenhouse. A  carbon-rich atmosphere can heat our climate up into a sweltering  greenhouse, but an oxygen-rich atmosphere cools it down and causes  what’s called an icehouse. Throughout its life, the planet has  vacillated between greenhouses and icehouses as part of a geological  process called the carbon cycle. Put in the simplest possible terms, a  greenhouse happens when carbon is free in the air, and an icehouse  occurs when carbon has been locked down or sequestered in the oceans and  rocks. During an icehouse, ice collects at the poles, sometimes  creeping down into lower latitudes during an ice age. But our recent ice  ages were nothing compared with Snowball Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo billion  years ago the sun was dimmer than it is today. As more and more  cyanobacteria pumped out oxygen, the whole place began to cool down.  Because the sun was a relatively weak heat source, this effect was  magnified into a “runaway icehouse.” Ice from the poles began to spread  outward, solidifying the top layer of the oceans and burying the land  beneath vast, frozen sheets. The more ice that formed, the more it  reflected sunlight—lowering the planet’s temperature further. Finally,  ice stretched from the poles nearly all the way to the equator,  pulverizing rocks beneath its weight. If you looked at Earth from space  at that time, you’d have seen a slushy white ball, its circumference  banded by a narrow equatorial ocean of algae-infested sludge. At that  moment in geological history, our planet resembled Saturn’s icy moon  Europa. It was an alien world called Snowball Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI visited  Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology to find out what  happened next. In the basement of the geology building, his generously  sized desk was piled with fossils, family photographs, papers, and his  prized possession, a cheap plastic vuvuzela from South Africa. “This is  real!” he enthused, gesturing at the instrument whose droning sound  annoyed and delighted audiences during the 2010 World Cup. Kirschvink  lit up when he talked about the provenance of objects, whether pop  culture ephemera or 3-billion-year-old fossils. Maybe it was his  off-kilter imagination that allowed him to look for environmental  patterns in Earth’s history that nobody had thought possible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKirschvink  believes that there may have been as many as three snowball phases on  Earth. “It was the longest, weirdest perturbation in the carbon cycle,”  Kirschvink said. “And my explanation for it is simple. It’s the time  between when the biosphere learned to make atmospheric oxygen and the  time when everybody else learned to breathe it and use it.” Without any  creatures around to breathe oxygen, the cyanobacteria likely created an  atmosphere far more oxygenated than any we’ve ever known.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor 1.5  billion years after cyanobacteria evolved, Earth’s biosphere was in  chaos. At least two more snowballs crept across the face of the planet,  followed by intensely hot greenhouse conditions caused when volcanoes  pumped carbon back into the air. Meanwhile, microbes were slowly  learning to use oxygen to their advantage. A new kind of cell called a  eukaryote began to populate the seas. Unlike cyanobacteria, which are  basically just genetic material contained inside a membrane, a  eukaryotic cell contains a nucleus packed with DNA as well as tiny  organs called, appropriately enough, organelles. One of those  organelles, called a mitochondrion, could turn free oxygen and other  nutrients into energy. At last, Earth was inhabited by oxygen-breathers.  The planet we know today was taking shape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile the eukaryotes  got busy swapping genetic material and sucking oxygen from the air, the  old methane-breathers were dying out. A few migrated to the sea floor,  finding niches near superheated volcanic vents where they could live in  the remaining fragments of a once-global methane ecosystem. But the rest  went extinct. It was the most extreme form of atmospheric pollution in  Earth’s history, soon killing off almost every form of life that  couldn’t breathe oxygen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy “soon,” I mean within a billion  years, or possibly 2 billion—a period of time that’s almost impossible  to wrap our minds around. Still, that is the timescale required to  understand Earth’s environmental transformations. Many of the  catastrophic changes we’ll discuss over the next few chapters took  millions of years to unfold. To geologists, we are all living in fast  motion, our lives so short that it’s usually impossible for us to  personally experience environmental change. Often, these scientists will  contrast “human-scale” time with what they clearly view as real time,  or time that unfolds on a planetary scale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of our most  incredible accomplishments as a species, however, is an ability to think  beyond our own life spans. We may not live in geologic time, but we can  know it. And the more we learn about our planet’s past, the more it  seems that Earth has been many different planets with dramatically  different climates and ecosystems. This idea offers a much broader  perspective than what you find in the work of environmentalists like  Bill McKibben, who argues in his book Eaarth that humans have burned so  much fossil fuel that we’re turning our planet into something  fundamentally different (requiring the new name Eaarth). In that book  and elsewhere, he laments the loss of “nature,” by which he means the  ecosystems that existed on Earth before human meddling. But before  humans took center stage on Earth, there were many permutations of  nature. Climate disasters were the norm. Indeed, the only way Earth  could ever transform enough to merit a new name like Eaarth would be if  the planet’s environment suddenly stopped changing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUndeniably,  our planet is undergoing potentially deadly environmental changes today.  But it’s incorrect to say that this is the first or even the worst time  it’s happened. For the creatures who perished during the Proterozoic,  and other periods we’ll learn about in the coming chapters, McKibben’s  ideal of nature would be deadly. Over the course of its history, Earth  has always vacillated between a carbon-rich greenhouse and its opposite,  the oxygen-rich icehouse where humanity is more comfortable. We’re  simply the first species on Earth to figure out how this climate cycle  works, and to realize that our survival depends on preventing the next  environmental shift.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDefining Mass Extinction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs bad as  the oxygen apocalypse was, neither Kirschvink nor the geobiologist Roger  Summons would call it a mass extinction. So how can an entire world  full of life go extinct without it being a mass extinction? This brings  us to the question of what mass extinction really is. In a remarkable  paper published in Nature in the spring of 2011, a group of biologists  from across North and South America exhaustively summed up all the data  available from the fossil record and present-day extinctions and came up  with a clear definition. They agreed that mass extinctions on Earth can  be defined as events in which 75 percent or more species go extinct in  less than 2 million years. The oxygen apocalypse didn’t happen fast  enough to qualify.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe statistician and paleontologist Charles  Marshall, a coauthor on that Nature paper, warns that the definition of  “mass extinction” is highly contextual and slippery. Sitting with his  back to an enormous window overlooking the UC Berkeley campus, Marshall  told me that the key to understanding mass extinction always begins with  a calculation of what researchers call the “background extinction  rate.” Species naturally pass into extinction all the time, at a rate of  about 1.8 extinctions per million species every year. On top of that,  there are also natural cycles of elevated extinction rates that fall  roughly every 62 million years in the fossil record. So just because a  bunch of creatures are going extinct, even in numbers above the  background extinction rate, doesn’t mean you’re looking at a mass  extinction. The only time you’re really seeing a mass extinction,  Marshall said, is when “you see a big spike sticking out of the  background distribution.” While on Earth those big spikes tend to be  times when 75 percent or more species go extinct, it’s all relative.  “You could imagine a planet where the biggest spikes sat at thirty  percent,” Marshall speculated. “On that planet, thirty percent of  species dying out would constitute a mass extinction.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are  some ways that the fossil record can trick us into seeing a mass  extinction where there isn’t one. Take, for example, the bombs at  Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rates of death were high, but they were low  in terms of the world’s population. If we looked at these atomic bomb  strikes in the fossil record, it might appear that there had been a mass  extinction, but that’s because we’d be mistaking the rates in one local  area for a global phenomenon. When geologists study mass extinction in  the fossil record, they constantly have to ask themselves whether the  extinctions they’re seeing are a statistical anomaly like Hiroshima, or  something more widespread. Mass extinction is not an absolute idea, and  to measure it we have to prove that the extinctions aren’t just  localized. Plus, we have to compare the rate of death to the normal  background extinction rate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill, the oxygen apocalypse does  resemble a mass extinction in one way. It ushered in a completely  different world, populated by an entirely new set of life forms. It gave  rise to the atmosphere that allowed life as we know it to develop. The  change was so dramatic, said Marshall, that “you’re measuring less by  magnitude and more by the idea of a world changed forever.” In every  mass extinction, the world is changed forever—but over a short,  terrifying two million years, rather than a slow billion. In the next  few chapters, we’re going to see exactly what that looks like.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300371648741,"sku":"NP9780307949424","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307949424.jpg?v=1767736179","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/scatter-adapt-and-remember-isbn-9780307949424","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}