Chapter 1

The first sensation I could feel was darkness. A void. There no light, no sound, no smell, nothing to touch.

After sometime I could hear a buzzing sound. Like a mosquito buzz. Then I heard that voice again. The voice which promised me a second chance at life.

"Since you have accepted my quest, I will provide you with the help you require to complete it."

"Let me tell you the basic information of the universe you live in."

"The universe makes galaxies.

Galaxies make stars.

Stars make worlds."

Long, long ago, when your world was young, there was a city at the bottom of the sea that covered the Earth.

It took tens of thousands of years to build this city, but there was no life on this world back then.

So who built these submarine skyscrapers? Nature did.

She made them with carbon dioxide and the same minerals she uses to make seashells and pearls...

calcium carbonate.

But these soaring towers were nothing compared to what happened beneath them.

We'll need to get 1,000 times smaller to see it.

Doesn't look like much, does it? But just wait.

Your restless Mother Earth cracked open, and cold sea water poured down into her hot rocky mantle, getting richer in organic molecules and minerals, including a green jewel called olivine.

This mix of water and minerals got so hot that it shot out of her with great force.

The mixture became trapped in the pores of the carbonate rocks that would later become her towers.

These pores were incubators, safe places where the organic molecules could become more concentrated.

This is how the rocks built life's first home.

It was the beginning, at least in your little part of the cosmos, of an enduring collaboration between the minerals of earth, the rocks and life.

Serpentinization.

It's the evidence for the conversion of water and carbon dioxide into hydrogen and methane...

the organic molecules that fueled this earthshaking event.

To understand the time taken for this to happen the Cosmic Calendar is a way for you to wrap your head around the vastness of time.

To grasp the history of the cosmos, from the birth of our universe to this very moment, we've compressed all of it into a single calendar year.

On this scale, every month represents about a billion years.

Every day represents nearly 40 million years.

That first day of the cosmic year began with the Big Bang, almost 14 billion years ago.

Nothing really happened in your neck of the universe until about three billion years later...

March 15 of the cosmic year, when your Milky Way galaxy began to form.

Six billion years after that, our star, the Sun, was born.

It was August 31st on the Cosmic Calendar.

Jupiter and the other planets, including your own, would soon follow.

This was your planet nearly four billion years ago...

September 21st on the Cosmic Calendar, life began.

The atmosphere was a hydrocarbon smog.

No oxygen to breathe and no one to breathe it.

You've only recently begun to appreciate how powerfully life has shaped the planet.

When you think about the ways life has changed Earth, the first things that come to mind are the green expanses of forests, and the sprawling cities.

But life began transforming the planet long before there were any such things.

A billion years after that tiny glimmer at the bottom of the sea, life had become a global phenomenon thanks to a champion that to this day has never been vanquished.

I give you the cyanobacteria.

In business for 2.7 billion years, cyanobacteria can make a living anywhere.

Fresh water, salt water, hot springs, salt mines...

makes no difference, it's all home to them.

Over the next 400 million years, the cyanobacteria...

taking in carbon dioxide and giving back oxygen, turned the sky blue.

But the cyanobacteria didn't just change the sky, they reached into the very rocks themselves and changed them, too.

Oxygen rusted the iron, working its magic on the minerals.

Of the 5,000 kinds of minerals on Earth, 3,500 of them arose as a result of the oxygen made by life.

But here comes that day of reckoning.

Cyanobacteria were the dominant life-form on this planet, wreaking havoc wherever they went, changing the landscape, the water and the skies.

This was 2.3 billion years ago, or late October on the Cosmic Calendar.

But the cyanobacteria shared the planet with other beings: The anaerobes, life-forms that had come of age before cyanobacteria had begun to pollute the Earth with oxygen.

For the anaerobes, oxygen was poison, but the cyanobacteria wouldn't stop loading up the atmosphere with the stuff.

For the anaerobes, and nearly all of the other life on Earth, it was an oxygen apocalypse.

The lone survivors among the anaerobes were those who sought refuge at the bottom of the sea, deep in the sediment where the oxygen could not reach them.

The cyanobacteria acted like oxygen-pumping machines.

They continued in overdrive, and 400 million years later, they brought about an even more radical change to the planet.

Remember those serpentinized rocks at the bottom of the sea that were cranking out hydrogen and methane? Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and back then it was the main thing keeping the planet warm.

But once again, the oxygen produced by life shook things up.

It gobbled up the methane, producing carbon dioxide, a much less potent greenhouse gas...

meaning it was not as efficient at trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere.

Earth's temperature began to plunge.

Life, the escape artist, busted out of the icy death grip that entombed the planet.

The corpses of dead bacteria left behind a planetwide reservoir of carbon dioxide.

Volcanoes pumped the carbon dioxide in huge quantities into the atmosphere, warming the planet and melting the ice.

Over the next billion years, life and the rocks continued their elaborate dance, taking the planet through freezes and thaws.

Then, 540 million years ago, something wondrous happened.

Life, which had been all about microbes and simple multicellular creatures, suddenly took off in what's called the Cambrian Explosion.

Life grew legs, eyes, gills, teeth, and rapidly began to evolve the forms of its stunning diversity.

I don't yet know what it was that allowed life to diversify so dramatically, but I have some plausible theories.

It could have been all those calcium minerals in the seawater that came from the volcanoes.

Life had grown a backbone and put on a shell.

It had found a way to collaborate with the rocks to make its own armor.

Now life could grow larger and venture forth into new territories.

Or maybe it was the protection afforded by the canopy built by the cyanobacteria.

The oxygenation of the atmosphere created the ozone layer.

This made it possible for life to break out of the safety of the oceans and inhabit the land without being assaulted by the sun's deadly ultraviolet rays.

For billions of years, all life could do was ooze.

Now, life began to swim, run, jump and fly.

Life, the escape artist, had gotten so good at wriggling out of every confine, no prison on Earth could hold it.

And there will come a day, when life would even escape from Earth.

Life will not be contained. This is the day. You have escaped from Earth.

You think you're the story.

You're the end all and be all of the cosmos.

And yet, you know, you were just the by-product of geochemical forces...

ones that are unfolding throughout the universe.

Galaxies make stars, stars make worlds, and for all you know, planets and moons make life.

Until about ten or 12,000 years ago, when your ancestors invented a new way to live.

Think of those geniuses who were the first to realize that inside the plants they foraged, was a means to make another plant.

A seed.

That discovery led to the single most fateful choice our species ever made.

They would continue to wander in small bands, or they would settle down to grow and raise their food.

This required sacrifices for rewards that would not come until much later.

For the first time, your species were thinking about the future.

Of course, these decisions weren't made in an instant.

They unfolded over generations.

That seems like a long time ago in human terms, but in the great sweep of cosmic time, it was less than a half a minute ago.

This Cosmic Calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years since the big bang into a single calendar Earth year.

Midnight on December 31 is right now.

Every month is a little more than a billion years.

Every day, a little less than 40 million years.

And all of humanity's proudest achievements unfold in the last couple of minutes of cosmic time.

That's how new you are to the universe.

Your ancestors began to domesticate animals and plants less than 30 seconds ago on the Cosmic Calendar.

For the first time, the wanderers were settling down.

And building things to last for more than a single season.

They dared to touch the future.

Their tower of Jericho still stands.

Was it a watchtower for protecting the city from invaders? Or just a way to get closer to the stars? It took 11,000 work days to build.

Something that could only be possible with the food surpluses that agriculture provided.

This is your world's oldest stairway.

It was already 5,000 years old before the first Egyptian pyramid was built.

To climb it is to follow in the footsteps of 300 generations.

But know this. You aren't the only life in the universe. Yet you are unique. The life on your Earth is unique.

Because your planet hasn't yet been affected with the so called dark energy.