Overview

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.

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9781035878871

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Valerie Teal was born in Leeds in 1949; she is a painter, sculptor, and writer. From the gardens and woodlands of 1950s suburban Britain to the wilds of Southwest Pembrokeshire, she has watched the biodiversity of Britain collapse. She has seen breathtaking developments in science and technology, including in December 1968 when the moon landing revealed the first image of Earth from the Moon, in 1989 the arrival of the World Wide Web and today with the birth of AI. The Britain of the 1960s was an optimistic place of employment, housing, and opportunity. For Valerie Teal, her first jobs included The Yorkshire Post and The Sunday Times. However, cities were not her natural environment. She has lived in Pembrokeshire in Southwest Wales for the last 50 years, raising her family, training riders and their horses, and as an artist, professional forager, and environmentalist. She stood for the Green Party in the 2016 Welsh Government elections. The mid-20s of the 21st century feel like the tipping point for many world events; there are going to be innumerable casualties of human activity, both of our own species and the rest of the natural world. Huge changes are coming; scientific innovations may yet save us and our fellow travellers. There will be survivors, as there have always been, and as science reveals, life will go on with or without us.

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