A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

  A great deal of extinction, Flannery and Schouten discovered, hasn't been cruel or wanton, but just kind of majestically foolish. In 1894, when a lighthouse was built on a lonely rock called Stephens Island, in the tempestuous strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, the lighthouse keeper's cat kept bringing him strange little birds that it had caught. The keeper dutifully sent some specimens to the museum in Wellington. There a curator grew very excited because the bird was a relic species of flightless wrens--the only example of a flightless perching bird ever found anywhere. He set off at once for the island, but by the time he got there the cat had killed them all. Twelve stuffed museum species of the Stephens Island flightless wren are all that now exist.

  At least we have those. All too often, it turns out, we are not much better at looking after species after they have gone than we were before they went. Take the case of the lovely Carolina parakeet. Emerald green, with a golden head, it was arguably the most striking and beautiful bird ever to live in North America--parrots don't usually venture so far north, as you may have noticed--and at its peak it existed in vast numbers, exceeded only by the passenger pigeon. But the Carolina parakeet was also considered a pest by farmers and easily hunted because it flocked tightly and had a peculiar habit of flying up at the sound of gunfire (as you would expect), but then returning almost at once to check on fallen comrades.

  In his classic American Omithology , written in the early nineteenth century, Charles Willson Peale describes an occasion in which he repeatedly empties a shotgun into a tree in which they roost:

  At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.

  By the second decade of the twentieth century, the birds had been so relentlessly hunted that only a few remained alive in captivity. The last one, named Inca, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918 (not quite four years after the last passenger pigeon died in the same zoo) and was reverently stuffed. And where would you go to see poor Inca now? Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.

  What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so. It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

  No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild. Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow. He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood--even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.

  His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects. He sent hordes of trained men--as many as four hundred at a time--to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens--particularly things that flew. These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild's estate at Tring, where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analyzed everything that came before them, producing a constant stream of books, papers, and monographs--some twelve hundred in all. Altogether, Rothschild's natural history factory processed well over two million specimens and added five thousand species of creature to the scientific archive.

  Remarkably, Rothschild's collecting efforts were neither the most extensive nor the most generously funded of the nineteenth century. That title almost certainly belongs to a slightly earlier but also very wealthy British collector named Hugh Cuming, who became so preoccupied with accumulating objects that he built a large oceangoing ship and employed a crew to sail the world full-time, picking up whatever they could find--birds, plants, animals of all types, and especially shells. It was his unrivaled collection of barnacles that passed to Darwin and served as the basis for his seminal study.

  However, Rothschild was easily the most scientific collector of his age, though also the most regrettably lethal, for in the 1890s he became interested in Hawaii, perhaps the most temptingly vulnerable environment Earth has yet produced. Millions of years of isolation had allowed Hawaii to evolve 8,800 unique species of animals and plants. Of particular interest to Rothschild were the islands' colorful and distinctive birds, often consisting of very small populations inhabiting extremely specific ranges.

  The tragedy for many Hawaiian birds was that they were not only distinctive, desirable, and rare--a dangerous combination in the best of circumstances--but also often heartbreakingly easy to take. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome. The last of the species vanished in 1896, killed by Rothschild's ace collector Harry Palmer, five years after the disappearance of its cousin the lesser koa finch, a bird so sublimely rare that only one has ever been seen: the one shot for Rothschild's collection. Altogether during the decade or so of Rothschild's most intensive collecting, at least nine species of Hawaiian birds vanished, but it may have been more.

  Rothschild was by no means alone in his zeal to capture birds at more or less any cost. Others in fact were more ruthless. In 1907 when a well-known collector named Alanson Bryan realized that he had shot the last three specimens of black mamos, a species of forest bird that had only been discovered the previous decade, he noted that the news filled him with "joy."

  It was, in short, a difficult age to fathom--a time when almost any animal was persecuted if it was deemed the least bit intrusive. In 1890, New York State paid out over one hundred bounties for eastern mountain lions even though it was clear that the much-harassed creatures were on the brink of extinction. Right up until the 1940s many states continued to pay bounties for almost any kind of predatory creature. West Virginia gave out an annual college scholarship to whoever brought in the most dead pests--and "pests" was liberally interpreted to mean almost anything that wasn't grown on farms or kept as pets.

  Perhaps nothing speaks more vividly for the strangeness of the times than the fate of the lovely little Bachman's warbler. A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually thrilling song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds, and that was the last that was ever seen of Bachman's warblers.

  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, bot
h 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 book The 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 in The 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.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1 HOW TO BUILD A UNIVERSE

  "Protons are so small that . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 111.

  "Now pack into that tiny, tiny space . . ." Guth, The Inflationary Universe , p. 254.

  "about 13.7 billion years . . ." U.S. News and World Report , "How Old Is the Universe?" August 18-25, 1997, pp. 34-36; and New York Times, "Cosmos Sits for Early Portrait, Gives Up Secrets," February 12, 2003, p. 1.

  "the moment known to science as t = 0 ." Guth, p. 86.

  "They climbed back into the dish . . ." Lawrence M. Krauss, "Rediscovering Creation," in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 50.

  "an instrument that might do the job . . ." Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos , p. 153.

  "They had found the edge of the universe . . ." Scientific American , "Echoes from the Big Bang," January 2001, pp. 38-43; and Nature , "It All Adds Up," December 19-26, 2002, p. 733.

  "Penzias and Wilson's finding pushed our acquaintance . . ." Guth, p. 101.

  "about 1 percent of the dancing static . . ." Gribbin, In the Beginning, p. 18.

  "These are very close to religious questions . . ." New York Times , "Before the Big Bang, There Was ... What?" May 22, 2001, p. F1.

  "or one 10 million trillion trillion trillionth . . ." Alan Lightman, "First Birth," in Shore, Mysteries of Life and the Universe, p. 13.

  "He was thirty-two years old . . ." Overbye, p. 216.

  "The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest . . ." Guth, p. 89.

  "doubling in size every 10 -34 seconds." Overbye, p. 242.

  "it changed the universe . . ." New Scientist , "The First Split Second," March 31, 2001, pp. 27-30.

  "perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars . . ." Scientific American , "The First Stars in the Universe," December 2001, pp. 64-71; and New York Times , "Listen Closely: From Tiny Hum Came Big Bang," April 30, 2001, p. 1.

  "no one had counted the failed attempts." Quoted by Guth, p. 14.

  "He makes an analogy with a very large clothing store . . ." Discover , November 2000.

  "with the slightest tweaking of the numbers . . ." Rees, Just Six Numbers , p. 147.

  "gravity may turn out to be a little too strong . . ." Financial Times , "Riddle of the Flat Universe," July 1-2, 2000; and Economist , "The World Is Flat After All," May 20, 2000, p. 97.

  "the galaxies are rushing apart." Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory , p. 34.

  "Scientists just assume that we can't really be the center . . ." Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 47.

  "the universe we know and can talk about . . ." Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 13.

  "the number of light-years to the edge . . ." Rees, p. 147.

  CHAPTER 2 WELCOME TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  "From the tiniest throbs and wobbles . . ." New Yorker , "Among Planets," December 9, 1996, p. 84.

  "less than the energy of a single snowflake . . ." Sagan, Cosmos , p. 217.

  "a young astronomer named James Christy . . ." U.S. Naval Observatory press release, "20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto's Moon Charon," June 22, 1998.

  "Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed," Atlantic Monthly , "When Is a Planet Not a Planet?" February 1998, pp. 22-34.

  "In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman . . ." Quoted on PBS Nova , "Doomsday Asteroid," first aired April 29, 1997.

  "it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again . . ." U.S. Naval Observatory press release, "20th Anniversary of the Discovery of Pluto's Moon Charon," June 22, 1998.

  ". . . after a year's patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto . . ." Tombaugh paper, "The Struggles to Find the Ninth Planet," from NASA website.

  "there may be a Planet X out there . . ." Economist , "X Marks the Spot," October 16, 1999, p. 83.

  "The Kuiper belt was actually theorized . . ." Nature , "Almost Planet X," May 24, 2001, p. 423.

  "Only on February 11, 1999, did Pluto return . . ." Economist , "Pluto Out in the Cold," February 6, 1999, p. 85.

  "over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects . . ." Nature , "Seeing Double in the Kuiper Belt," December 12, 2002, p. 618.

  "about the same as a lump of charcoal . . ." Nature , "Almost Planet X," May 24, 2001, p. 423.

  "now flying away from us . . ." PBS NewsHour transcript, August 20, 2002.

  "fills less than a trillionth of the available space." Natural History , "Between the Planets," October 2001, p. 20.

  "The total now is 'at least ninety . . .' " New Scientist , "Many Moons," March 17, 2001, p. 39; and Economist , "A Roadmap for Planet-Hunting," April 8, 2000, p. 87.

  "we won't reach the Oort cloud . . ." Sagan and Druyan, Comet , p. 198.

  "probably result in the deaths of all the crew . . ." New Yorker , "Medicine on Mars," February 14, 2000, p. 39.

  "the comets drift in a stately manner . . ." Sagan and Druyan, p. 195.

  "The most perfect vacuum ever created . . ." Ball, H 2 O , p. 15.

  " Our nearest neighbor in the cosmos," Proxima Centauri . . ." Guth, p. 1; and Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 39.

  "The average distance between stars . . ." Dyson, Disturbing the Universe , p. 251.

  "If we were randomly inserted . . ." Sagan, p. 52.

  CHAPTER 3 THE REVEREND EVANS'S UNIVERSE

  "the energy of a hundred billion suns . . ." Ferris, The Whole Shebang , p. 37.

  "It's like a trillion hydrogen bombs . . ." Robert Evans, interview by author, Hazelbrook, Australia, September 2, 2001.

  "a chapter on autistic savants . . ." Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars , p. 198.

  "an irritating buffoon . . ." Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps , p. 164.

  "refused to be left alone with him . . ." Ferris, The Whole Shebang , p. 125.

  "Zwicky threatened to kill Baade .
. ." Overbye, p. 18.

  "Atoms would literally be crushed together . . ." Nature , "Twinkle, Twinkle, Neutron Star," November 7, 2002, p. 31.

  "the biggest bang in the universe . . ." Thorne, p. 171.

  "hasn't been verified yet." Thorne, p. 174.

  "one of the most prescient documents . . ." Thorne, p. 174.

  "he did not understand the laws of physics . . ." Thorne, p. 174.

  "wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades . . ." Overbye, p. 18.

  "Only about 6,000 stars . . ." Harrison, Darkness at Night , p. 3.

  "In 1987 Saul Perlmutter . . ." BBC Horizon documentary, "From Here to Infinity," transcript of program first broadcast February 28, 1999.

  "The news of such an event . . ." John Thorstensen, interview by author, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 5, 2001.

  "Only half a dozen times . . ." Note from Evans, December 3, 2002.

  "cosmologist and controversialist . . ." Nature, "Fred Hoyle (1915-2001)," September 17, 2001, p. 270.

  "humans evolved projecting noses . . ." Gribbin and Cherfas, p. 190.

  "continually creating new matter as it went." Rees, p. 75.

  "100 million degrees or more . . ." Bodanis, E = mc 2 , p. 187.

  "99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system . . ." Asimov, Atom , p. 294.

  "In just 200 million years . . ." Stevens, The Change in the Weather , p. 6.

  "Most of the lunar material . . ." New Scientist supplement, "Firebirth," August 7, 1999, unnumbered page.

  "first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly." Powell, Night Comes to the Cretaceous , p. 38.

  "Earth might well have frozen over permanently" Drury, Stepping Stones , p. 144.

  CHAPTER 4 THE MEASURE OF THINGS

  "a long and productive career . . ." Sagan and Druyan, p. 52.

  "a very specific and precise curve . . ." Feynman, Six Easy Pieces , p. 90.