Life Story - Paperback

by Valerie Teal (Author)

Congratulations, you are alive! This is the adventure story of Life, the ultimate survivor. It is an account of the never-ending battle life wages against competing organisms, the great accidents of existence in the solar system, and the meteorological and geothermic events of a young planet. This is how life fought its way through unimaginable challenges, and how it will do so again. So far, life has endured five mass extinctions and a global warming event. You carry a survival kit that has protected you from fire, flood, famine, and poisoning. You are made of stardust that is 13.8 billion years old. You are a home, a partner, and a life support system to billions of organisms, surrounded by your fellow survivors. This is a story of big numbers: billions of stars, neurons, genes, cells, eggs, spores, and connections. Life has taken an unfathomable amount of time to reach this point, overcoming catastrophe after catastrophe with a mix of luck and remarkable engineering. Every living thing around you and within you is both a refugee from countless disasters and a testament to resilience and adaptation. The gift of evolution has bestowed humanity with great intelligence, and with great intelligence comes great responsibility.