A summary of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
Feeling ambitious? Embark on a journey to write a short history of everything, and I mean *everything!* And that is exactly what Bill Bryson attempts to do in his book “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” Apparently one day the author was flying across the sea somewhere and it struck him that he didn’t know that much about the world he lived in. So, for the next 3 years or so he went about rectifying that by learning and researching many of the topics that eventually went into the making of this book.
The author takes his readers on an epic journey from the very beginning… from the Big Bang to modern human history, with many interesting stops and detours along the way. I just shudder to think about how much research must have gone into the creation of a book like this, which manages to touch upon a wide variety of topics, with just the right level of depth to convey the essence of said topics.
There are so many wonderful ideas and theories explored in the book that I don’t even know where to start — how did a totally inhospitable planet (at its creation) turn into this planet we call home over roughly 4.5 billion years, how and where did life begin, how did our atmosphere become just so (with the right blend of nitrogen and oxygen that supports life), what has been the impact of multiple cycles of freezing and warming of the planet (some ice ages last for thousands of years and have had a profound impact on the shaping of the continents), what saves us from complete annihilation due to exposure to cosmic rays that are all around us? There are many, many such questions answered with I believed were very satisfactory answers.
As the book unfolds, we learn about the many scientists across a multitude of disciplines that spent untold effort deciphering the mysteries of the natural world, both macroscopic and microscopic. We may have heard about some of these people in the course of our education, but in this book, we learn a bit more about some of these famous names, what were their motivations, their ambitions, and not unimportantly, their frailties? These were human beings, after all.
Bill Bryson spends a portion of the book discussing how humans (more precisely Homo sapiens) got here. There are many theories, but the way to prove them is through fossil records, and I found out that fossil records are notoriously hard to get for reasons that I had not contemplated before. For instance, the whole of India has yielded only one ancient human fossil, from about 300,000 years ago. You need to have a Goldilocks scenario for a fossil to be created for posterity — just the right combination of several environmental factors have to exist, which is why a preponderance of the fossil record comprises marine life, and not that many of terrestrial life. So, for what it is worth, there are many theories out there, but the missing link is still missing!
Apart from all this, I learnt so many interesting facts about the natural world…
If you were to build a scale model of the solar system, and the Earth was the size of a pea, Pluto (which is one-half of one percent the size of the Earth) would be about 1–1/2 miles away and be the size of a bacterium. Who would’ve thunk!
Now let’s go to something microscopic — the common yeast cell, which is infinitesimally small… a yeast cell contains as many parts as a modern Boeing 777 Aircraft, all fitting into a teeny tiny sphere about 6 microns wide, and this sphere can reproduce itself ad infinitum! I cannot even begin to describe the feeling of awe when I read that.
And let us go further into the sub-cellular level and talk about DNA — the code of life itself! Each human cell has about 6ft length of DNA, and assuming a human body has 10 trillion cells, we are talking about approximately 10 billion miles of DNA embedded in each human body, enough to stretch to the sun and back 61 times! Is your mind blown yet? Mine is… :)
Continuing the topic of DNA, human beings have less genetic diversity than a social group of 50-ish chimpanzees. Isn’t that amazing? All humanity seems to have been derived from a relatively some group of ancestors.
Bizarre experiments have shown that DNA is not just the blueprint for life, it is a blueprint for *all* life. In one experiment, some scientists inserted genetic material that is responsible for a mouse’s eye into a fruit fly larva. The scientists were bracing themselves to see an unusual eye popping up on the fruit fly, but instead what they saw was the development of a fly’s eye. So, effectively, though the mouse and the fruit fly did not have a common ancestor going back 500 or so million years, their genetic blueprints are astoundingly similar.
I could go on and on and recite many other improbable sounding things, but I will curb my enthusiasm, and let you discover for yourself what a wonderful book this is to read.
As human beings we seem to think we are the bee’s knees and all that, but the author puts us in our place: “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.”
And given how intent human beings seem to be in destroying everything in sight (we have contributed to extinctions in the natural world at an unprecedented pace and scale), the author says: “it is an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”
Now, that is something to ponder over!
