Chapter Content
Okay, so, welcome, welcome, and congrats, congrats, you actually made it! I'm, like, genuinely impressed. You know, it's not easy getting here, to this whole existence thing. Actually, I think it's even harder than you probably realize.
So, first off, you're here now, and that means trillions of free-floating atoms had to, like, somehow get together and arrange themselves in this super complex, super specific way to create you. And this exact arrangement? Never happened before. Only gonna happen once. And, for the next, well, hopefully many years, these little particles, they're just gonna be working their butts off, doing billions of these intricate collaborations to keep you intact, to let you experience this, like, incredibly pleasant and often-underappreciated journey we call... life.
Now, why these atoms go to all this trouble? That's, uh, still a bit of a mystery. It's not exactly a walk in the park for them, forming you. And even though they're totally focused on this task, the atoms that make you up? They don't actually care about you. They don't even know you're there! And they don't really know where *they* are either. They're just these mindless particles, right? They don't even have their own life, you know? (It's kinda a weird thought, but if you grabbed some tweezers and, like, started plucking away atoms from your body, one by one, you'd just end up as a pile of, like, super fine atomic dust. None of those atoms ever lived, but they were all, at one point, part of you.) But, anyway, while you're alive, they're all dedicated to the same job: making you, you.
But, here's the thing, atoms are fickle. Their dedication is, like, fleeting. *Really* fleeting. And, that's the bad news. Even if you live a really long life, you only get, like, a million hours or so. And when that end point, which isn't so far off, or even some other end point along the way, comes racing up to meet you, for reasons we don't fully understand, your atoms are just gonna say, "Alright, we're done here!" and peace out. They'll just drift away and become something else. And that's it. You're done.
But, hey, the cool part is, it *did* happen! And you should be happy about that, because as far as we know, it's not happening anywhere else in the universe. It's really strange when you think about it. Atoms are willing to get together in this generous, coordinated way to make life here on Earth, but the same bunch of atoms somewhere else? Nah, they're not interested.
And, get this, from a chemical standpoint, life is, like, shockingly ordinary. It's unbelievable! Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, a little calcium, a little sulfur, plus some other totally run-of-the-mill elements, the kind of stuff you could find at any pharmacy, basically. That's all you need! The only thing that makes the atoms special is that they form *you*. And, of course, that's the miracle of life right there.
And, you know, whether or not atoms are forming life somewhere else, they are definitely forming tons of other stuff. Actually, they're forming everything else *except* life. Without atoms, there's no water, no air, no rocks, no stars and planets, no distant clouds, no swirling nebulae, nothing that makes the universe so beautiful, so... tangible. There are just so many atoms, and they're so essential that we can easily forget they need to exist in the first place.
There's no law that says the universe has to be full of these tiny particles, or that it has to create light, gravity, and all the other physical properties we rely on to exist. Actually, there doesn't even *need* to be a universe at all. For a really long time, there *wasn't* one. No atoms, no universe for atoms to float around in. Nothing. Absolutely nothing, anywhere.
So, thank goodness for atoms! But even with atoms, and them being willing to get together, that's only part of the reason you're here. You're here, in the 21st century, and smart enough to know about all this, you also have to be the beneficiary of this ridiculously improbable string of biological good luck. Surviving on Earth? It's surprisingly difficult! Since the beginning of time, there have been, like, hundreds of billions of species, and most of them, I think it's said to be 99.9%, are now extinct. See, life on Earth, it's not just short, it's frustratingly fragile. We came from a planet that's good at creating life, but even better at destroying it. It's a, um, pretty interesting characteristic of our existence, wouldn't you say?
The average species on Earth only lasts about four million years. So to stick around for billions of years, you gotta keep changing, just like the atoms that created you. You gotta be prepared for everything about you, your shape, your size, your color, what kind of creature you are, all of that to change, over and over and over again. It's easier said than done, because the process is unpredictable. To go from "primordial atomic globule," you know, to a sentient, upright, modern human, you had to keep producing new traits in a super precise way for a really long time.
So, at different points over the past 3.8 billion years, you hated oxygen, then you loved it, you grew fins, limbs, and, I guess, wings, you laid eggs, you licked the air with a forked tongue, you were sleek, you were furry, you lived underground, you lived in trees, you were as big as an elk, as small as a mouse, and, like, over a million other things. And all of that stuff, all of those things were essential steps. If even the tiniest thing had gone wrong, you might be, like, scraping algae off the walls of a cave right now, or lounging around on some pebble beach like a walrus, or maybe blowing air out of a nostril on top of your head and diving 60 feet down to eat a tasty earthworm.
You haven't just been incredibly lucky all this time. You belong to a favored evolutionary line. You've also been unbelievably, I mean, *miraculously*, lucky when it comes to your ancestors. Think about it. For 3.8 billion years, a time even longer than the mountains, rivers, and oceans on this planet, every single ancestor on both your mother's and your father's sides was attractive enough, found a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and lucky enough to live to the age of reproduction. None of those ancestors of yours got squashed, or eaten, or drowned, or starved, or got stuck, or injured early in life, or failed to pass on a little bit of genetic material to the right partner at the right time, so that this unbelievably rare process of genetic combination could continue, eventually, surprisingly, creating *you*.
So, basically, this whole… thing… well, it's a story of how all this happened. Especially how we went from not existing at all to becoming something, and then how a tiny little bit of that something became us. And I'm also gonna talk about what happened during that time and before that time. So, yeah, it's gonna cover a lot. And that's why this book is called "A Short History of Nearly Everything," even though it's really not, and probably couldn't be. But hey, if we're lucky, by the time you're done listening, you might have some sense of the overall picture. So, here we go.