Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

by Annalee Newitz

3.48 · Rating Details · 1,076 Ratings · 226 Reviews

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of o In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference.
It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just
during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions.
This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.
Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds. ...more

Hardcover, 305 pages

Published May 14th 2013 by Doubleday (first published January 1st 2013)

More Details... edit details

Get a copy:

Or buy for

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Lists with This Book

Test HC List

28th out of 36 books — 1 voter

Best book covers of 2013

237th out of 260 books — 564 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)

filter | sort: default (?) | Rating Details

Jun 19, 2013 Scott rated it it was ok

Going on subject matter alone, Annalee Newitz's piece of nonfiction sounds like it would be great, a portrait of Earth's first five mass extinctions, a look at why we're probably in the midst of a sixth, and a guide to how we, humankind, can ultimately survive when other mighty, planet-ruling species could not. (SPOILER: by scattering, adapting, and remembering.) But Newitz, the editor of io9, can't pull it off. In fact, this is one of the very few books I've ever stopped reading once I've gotte ...more

flag 11 likes · Like · see review

Aug 14, 2016 Wanda rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: conspiracy theorists, LOL

Shelves: first-reads, favorites

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

I won this book via Goodreads First Reads. Thank you.

I totally enjoyed this book on so many levels. The book is divided into five sections. The first section starts out in ancient earth and covers the diverse ways earth has experienced mass extinctions. Thanks to tiny blue - green algae that knit itself together earth went through an oxygen apocalypse. The amateur geologist in me loved the first part. Besides covering biological and geological changes, part one also t ...more

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

Jul 18, 2013 Kate rated it it was ok

Shelves: science, natural-history, earth-climate-and-natural-disasters, post-apocolyptic-fic, in-the-future, slate, new-science, new-in-2013, 21st-century-ideas, disaster-fiction

Full Disclosure: I received a free galley from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

I want to mention the positive things about Scatter, Adapt, and Remember before I get to the problems with it. Here they are:

1. This is an awesome subject, that of future human evolution and radical approaches to sustaining human life on this planet and beyond. I was nominally interested in this type of futurism before reading SAR, but now I'm ready to attack the Canon.

2. Newitz is a great writer: li Full Disclosure: I received a free galley from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review.

I want to mention the positive things about Scatter, Adapt, and Remember before I get to the problems with it. Here they are:

1. This is an awesome subject, that of future human evolution and radical approaches to sustaining human life on this planet and beyond. I was nominally interested in this type of futurism before reading SAR, but now I'm ready to attack the Canon.

2. Newitz is a great writer: lively and informative.

3. Newitz is also has a very fascinating thesis: humanity survived past catastrophes and will survive future catastrophes by 1) Scattering to distant and more hospitable locales or possibly planets, 2) Adapting to their new environments and 3) Preserving their symbolic culture for future generations.

4. DINOSAURS! PRE=HISTORIC HUMANS! They are covered here

5. For bibliophiles who all of a sudden found themselves VERY interested in mass extinctions and futurism, the notes are a treasure trove of references to books and articles. My to-read list just kept growing and growing.

6. Fascinating discussion of how science fiction might teach us how to survive the apocalypse.

That's done, now here's the bad part. The two-star part:

This book is too damn short.

It's a common complaint I read in reviews on goodreads and amazon: this book could have used a better editor. This book might have been better with out one. You can practically see the red ink on the page here. So much is missing, the culprit completely obvious from the perfectly palatable-to-hoi-polloi 300 pages here. The chapters so formulaic, like a sixth grader's book report. Say what you're going to say. Say it. Say what you said. Book profiles come with lots of statistics: page length, date of publication, weight, dimensions. There should be an additional: Optimal page length. This is an 800 page book squeezed into 300 pages. Entire arguments are gutted to fit each chapter section into a neat three paragraphs, leading the reader to have to make the logical leaps necessary to complete them. A subject as complex as the evolutionary advantage of diaspora is given a single example from human history. The chapter on adaptations covers one that is still in R&D - more of a potential future adaptation. On the whole, the subject matter hinted at in the title gets three sections out of six: You had no idea you were reading a book about space elevators, did you?!

I would gladly have read five hundred more pages of this in exchange for more examples and completed arguments. This really could have been a three book trilogy: 1) How mass exticntions have gone down in the past: 2) Ways organisms have survived them 3) space elevators will solve everything. I anticipate with glee wasting hours on io9.com, based on the strength of Newitz's writing. I will read her next book. I just hope that someone will lay off of the red pen next time. ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Apr 16, 2014 First Second Books added it

Shelves: gina

All the most fun parts of mass extinctions throughout history – dinosaurs! volcanos! Neanderthals! – combined with the fun parts of what we can do to survive them in the future (the living biological cities are a favorite of mine).

Nonfiction doesn’t get much better than this.

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Jul 31, 2013 Gendou rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, futurism

This book reads a little bit like a High School essay. It has lose structure and less of a thesis than a message of hope in the face of calamity, written in an immature, less-than-serious tone. Annalee Newitz makes mass extinction is fun!

Topics range from mass extinctions of the past, to the present anthropogenic (man-made) mass extinction, to the future of humanity on other worlds.

Sometimes, the author's fun-girl tone was inappropriate, like making jokes about the end of human life. Other times ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

May 13, 2013 Brian Clegg rated it really liked it

I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the pragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So I thought that I would find this book, with its subtitle How Humans will survive a mass extinction somewhat unappetising – but I was wrong.

The Earth has gone through a number of mass extinctions, where a fair percentage of living species have been ki I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the pragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So I thought that I would find this book, with its subtitle How Humans will survive a mass extinction somewhat unappetising – but I was wrong.

The Earth has gone through a number of mass extinctions, where a fair percentage of living species have been killed off. The most famous is the one that mostly took out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago, but there have been others and, Annalee Newitz points out, if we want to see the long term survival of the human race, we need to be able to make it through one, should it turn up, whether caused by climate change, pandemics, a supervolcano or an asteroid.

What Newitz does surprisingly well here is weave together what are really around four different books, all in one compact volume. We start of with palaeontology, looking back over previous mass extinctions, getting a better understanding of what happened, what survived and how it survived. From here we segue into human pre-history and history, drawing lessons from the plight of the Neanderthal and the impact of plague and other pandemics. After this, in a transitional section we see the examples of the three techniques in the book’s title – scattering in the Jewish disaspora, adaptation in cyanobacteria (and how we could use it) and remembering on the part of the gray whale, before taking another transition into a more science-fiction driven view.

Newitz starts by pointing out the potential lessons to be learned from the SF writing of Octavia Butler who is apparently ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writers’, which I was a bit surprised by as I read a lot of science fiction and I’ve never heard of her. The segue here is into the shakiest part of the book where it dabbles in futurology. This broadly divides into relatively short term survival approaches and longer term diaspora into space.

One of the reasons this is the weakest part of the book is that Newitz offers us castle-in-the-air solutions with no obvious way (and certainly no hint) of how to get there from where we are now. So she says we will need underground cities if we need to survive some kinds of impact, while we would be helped by building green cities that merge biology and construction… but it’s not clear how we would ever get started on such major, long term projects. She doesn’t address the reality that humans are very bad at taking the long view.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised by this book, particularly the first half. This is genuinely interesting and thought provoking, up to and including the Octavia Butler section. And though it goes a little downhill after that, it never fails to be readable and interesting – just a little far fetched. So congratulations to Newitz on taking the rare long view – and in having optimism for our ability to survive what the universe can throw at us.

Review first published on www.popularscience.co.uk and reproduced with permission ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Oct 12, 2014 MaryJo rated it really liked it

I heard the author interviewed on NPR, and I was intrigued. This book is a little out of my usual range, partly because it is more natural science based. I learned a lot about previous mass extinctions, and how knowledge about them shapes some researchers' thinking. Also, much of the thinking about future mass extinction here assumes that technology can provide answers. It was interesting to hear about people who are trying to build an elevator that will take people out of the earth's atmosphere ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

May 25, 2014 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, owned

This was an impulse buy at the bookstore. The title and blurb promised me exactly the sort of book I was looking for at that moment: an optimistic account of how humanity will realize its destiny as starseed. This book didn't exactly deliver on that, but it did deliver a fair amount of interesting information along the way.

The book is divided into five parts, but thematically, I think it's really three: 1) A history of mass-extinctions and crisis points. 2) Stories of how life itself, and later, This was an impulse buy at the bookstore. The title and blurb promised me exactly the sort of book I was looking for at that moment: an optimistic account of how humanity will realize its destiny as starseed. This book didn't exactly deliver on that, but it did deliver a fair amount of interesting information along the way.

The book is divided into five parts, but thematically, I think it's really three: 1) A history of mass-extinctions and crisis points. 2) Stories of how life itself, and later, humanity, survived these bottlenecks and crises. 3) Science and developments happening right now that may help us through our current age of extinction and global warming.

Some of Newitz's choices never seem fully justified. The book seems to exist in a muddled grey space between "my personal journey from despair to hope over the ultimate fate of humanity" and "an academic treatise on the possibilities of the continued existence of the human race." For instance, as an example of the survival of a particular human culture through multiple crises, she uses the Jewish diaspora. Which may be fully legitimate, but an academic text would have either discussed more examples or made a better case for why we're discussing this one in particular rather than giving the feeling that this is the case we're discussing because Newitz is Jewish and she knew the most about this one.

Lest you think I'm just being Anti-Semetic, Newitz also promises to plumb the world of science fiction for ideas of how humanity will survive. But this exploration is limited solely to the works of Octavia Butler. Now, I love Octavia Butler. She is hands-down one of my favorite writers and I referenced her idea of Earthseed or starseed in the beginning of this review. But really, why only Butler? The choice is never explained.

So mostly, the parts of the book I most enjoyed were those describing current science that may lend to our survival and imagining the future. There was some great stuff on living buildings (seriously, some Slonczewski references would have been great here!), and interesting discussion of the still theoretical space elevator, and the rarely made acknowledgement that humans are continuously evolving, and that even without genetic engineering or uploading ourselves into computers, should we survive, the humans of a million years from now will look radically different.

So, this wasn't exactly the book I was looking for. But that book would probably have been agonizingly long. This book was still a step in the right direction. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

May 27, 2014 Jana rated it really liked it

Shelves: 4-stars, giveaways

If you want to know more about what Earth was up to before humans showed up (freezing into an ice ball, then slowly turning into a swampy mess of greenhouse gases, then back to ice, and back to gas, and so forth) or what humans might be able to do in order to survive the eventual gasification/iceification in the planet's future (sort out our silly shit like wars and human-induced water shortages, get to work on space travel, GTFO), read this book. Newitz's style is entertaining while still remai ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 05, 2013 Jaylia3 rated it it was amazing

Love post-apocalypse fiction? Here’s apocalyptic science made utterly fascinating and relatively hopeful--

How can humanity survive life-annihilating disasters like global warming, cyclical ice ages, cosmic radiation, mega-volcanoes, rampaging pathogens, and asteroid strikes? After talking with scientists, engineers, philosophers, historians, technicians and--as she puts it--sundry brainiacs, Annalee Newitz has a few suggestions. Since I inexplicably love novels, movies, and TV shows set in post Love post-apocalypse fiction? Here’s apocalyptic science made utterly fascinating and relatively hopeful--

How can humanity survive life-annihilating disasters like global warming, cyclical ice ages, cosmic radiation, mega-volcanoes, rampaging pathogens, and asteroid strikes? After talking with scientists, engineers, philosophers, historians, technicians and--as she puts it--sundry brainiacs, Annalee Newitz has a few suggestions. Since I inexplicably love novels, movies, and TV shows set in post-apocalyptic times I found her book utterly fascinating.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember covers a vast territory of time, from the earliest days of life on Earth until a million years in the future. The first section, A History of Mass Extinctions, describes times when life was almost snuffed out completely, only to reemerge adapted for new conditions. Often these almost end-times were brought on by external forces, but it turns out we aren’t the first species to pollute our own environment--that would be the oxygen spewing cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae). Oxygen was poisonous to the life forms of early Earth and most of them died off when it began to fill the atmosphere, but the change set our planet on a trajectory that gave rise to the world as we know it.

The second section of the book, We Almost Didn’t Make It, covers times when starvation or plague killed vast numbers of people. Lessons From Survivors draws its conclusions from many different life forms that have survived mass death, not just humans. Sections titled How to Build a Death-Proof City, which suggests possibilities like underground communities, urban agriculture, and bioplastic buildings, and The Million Year View, which has space colonies among its ideas, conclude the book.

Some of the information is necessarily speculative, but science is exciting in Newitz’s hands. It’s a hopeful book, drawing ideas for the future from the many times life forms on Earth have managed to sneak past the ultimate grim reaper. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 27, 2013 Lianne Burwell rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, apocalypse, library

I'm a little conflicted in reviewing this books. I enjoyed it, and there was a lot of interesting information, but it was not the book that was promised.

Basically, the book says it wants to look at mass extinctions, are we in one, and what we can do to survive.

The first chunk of the book looks at past mass extinctions, what caused them, what died, and what survived (and why). Very interesting stuff. But when we hit recorded history, things swerve well off topic. The black death is interesting, a ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

May 15, 2013 John rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, history, general-nonfiction

How Humanity Will Survive Mass Extinctions and Other Calamities

Humanity has the potential of surviving calamities as dire as the next mass extinction. That is the hopeful message lurking behind science journalist - and founding editor of the science/science fiction website io9 – Annalee Newitz’s book “Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction”. Hers is a lively, rather engaging, look at mass extinctions and other notorious agents of mass mortality like famines and di How Humanity Will Survive Mass Extinctions and Other Calamities

Humanity has the potential of surviving calamities as dire as the next mass extinction. That is the hopeful message lurking behind science journalist - and founding editor of the science/science fiction website io9 – Annalee Newitz’s book “Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction”. Hers is a lively, rather engaging, look at mass extinctions and other notorious agents of mass mortality like famines and disease pandemics, on how survivors have coped with them and on the potential of human engineering for preventing humanity’s extinction. However, it is an examination that some may view as superficial with regards to its depth, in stark comparison with, for example, some of the best science writing from the likes of David Quammen, Carl Zimmer, and invertebrate paleobiologist Peter Ward – who was interviewed for this book – that delves deeper into the science behind disease pandemics and mass extinctions. While I admire Newitz’s literary style and the vast scope of topics and issues she discusses, I’ve noted some glaring editorial errors which detract from the book’s overall quality; these include incorrectly referring to synapsid mammal-like reptiles as mammal-reptile hybrids (Page 37), gray whales as among the oldest cetaceans since they evolved 2.5 million years ago (Page 137) when their phylogenetic (in plain English, genealogical) history probably dates back at least 25 million years ago if not before, or identifying paleobiologists (a newer, more accurate, version of the term paleontologist) Peter Ward and Jessica Whiteside solely as geologists when their primary research specialties are respectively, invertebrate paleobiology (Ward), and vertebrate paleobiology and paleoclimatology (Whiteside).

As much as I enjoyed reading her chapter devoted to the terminal Ordovician mass extinction ("Two Ways To Go Extinct"), as a former invertebrate paleobiologist I wish she had mentioned the Great Ordovician Diversification Event that occurred for much of the Ordovician, yielding substantial - and far more rapid - increases in metazoan (multicellular animal) taxonomic diversity on a scale far greater than the so-called "Cambrian Explosion"; a discussion of this might have emphasized why the terminal Ordovician mass extinction should be viewed, along with the terminal Permian mass extinction, as the worst in the history of life on Earth. Moreover, there is no substantial discussion on how the biosphere recovers from mass extinctions as devastating as the terminal Ordovician, terminal Permian and terminal Cretaceous extinctions - which would have been appropriate for this book - especially when paleobiologists and ecologists have been statistically analyzing the fossil record in studying the timing and severity of mass extinctions and the recovery times for restoring Earth's biodiversity to pre-mass extinction levels for decades. Nor do I concur with her less than favorable assessment of the "Out of Africa" theory for spreading modern Homo sapiens across the globe in favor of the earlier multiregional theory suggesting that Homo sapiens evolved separately - but simultaneously - in Europe and Asia in the chapter "Meeting the Neanderthals", when mitochondrial DNA evidence still strongly supports the "Out of Africa" theory, according to what I have seen at websites like those of the American Museum of Natural History and the University of California, Berkeley's "Understanding Evolution". Relying solely on anthropologist and science blogger John Hawks' genetic evidence in support of the multiregional theory should not have led Newitz to conclude that it may be a better scientific alternative than the currently accepted "Out of Africa" theory. These are not the only instances where Newitz strays from the high journalistic standards practiced consistently by the likes of Natalie Angier, Cornelia Dean, David Quammen, Jonathan Weiner and Carl Zimmer, but they are among the most notable insofar that she tends to voice her own opinions instead of relying upon the words of scientists or in failing to emphasize scientific consensus in support of both the asteroid impact theory for the terminal Cretaceous mass extinction and the "Out of Africa" theory for Homo sapiens' dispersal around the globe.

Newitz is at her best in describing how prior human technology saved some populations from the ravages of disease and conquest in her chapter “Cities That Hide” or in making cities “death-proof” (especially the chapters “The Mutating Metropolis”, “Using Math to Stop a Pandemic”, and “Every Surface a Farm”). She also excels in taking in Part V – the concluding section – “A Million Year View”; her accounts of geoengineering (“Terraforming Earth”), asteroid detection and preventing an asteroid collision with Earth (“Not in Our Planetary Backyard”) and building space elevators (“Take a Ride in the Space Elevator”) are worth the purchase price of this book. I also highly recommend her excellent overview of Jewish history over the millennia as one which resonates strongly with the book’s title in the chapter “Scatter: Footprints of the Diaspora” and her terse, but insightful, look at optimism for humanity’s future that is a reoccurring theme in Octavia Butler’s acclaimed science fiction (“Pragmatic Optimism, or Stories of Survival”). That these are the best sections of Newitz’s book isn’t surprising given her longstanding interest in science fiction as io9’s science editor. Though there are other, better, books which explore in greater depth the themes discussed here, none have the vast scope or the emotional resonance that is displayed abundantly, and for these reasons “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction” is still a work of popular science journalism worthy of a wide readership.

(EDITORIAL NOTE 5/15/13: As a book on mass extinctions, it seems to ignore important research done by the "Chicago School" of invertebrate paleobiologists - the late Jack Sepkoski, David Raup, David Jablonski and Michael Foote (all of whom were or are currently members of the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago) - in looking at the severity, timing and ecosystems recovery in the aftermath of mass extinctions that they and their colleagues have done since the late 1970s/early 1980s. Nor does the author acknowledge the overwhelming paleobiological and molecular genetic data in support of the "Out of Africa" theory accounting for Homo sapiens' dispersal around the globe. IMHO these are two of several glaring defects in this book which reduces its importance as a good work of popular scientific literature devoted to the themes alluded to in its title.) ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Mar 25, 2013 Dan Barr rated it liked it

Shelves: first-reads

*note: This review is for an advanced, uncorrected proof*
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a book of both solid strengths and clear weaknesses. On the one hand it is a book about an important, and under-appreciated topic; the various potential apocalypses and how we, as a species, might survive or avoid them. On the other hand, as a book that should offer a wide range of scenarios and solutions, it left me wanting. This is especially true when Newitz broaches the subject of science-fiction, a genr *note: This review is for an advanced, uncorrected proof*
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a book of both solid strengths and clear weaknesses. On the one hand it is a book about an important, and under-appreciated topic; the various potential apocalypses and how we, as a species, might survive or avoid them. On the other hand, as a book that should offer a wide range of scenarios and solutions, it left me wanting. This is especially true when Newitz broaches the subject of science-fiction, a genre with literally thousands of examples of humans surviving natural and man-made disasters, alien landscapes, and space environments, and yet she restricts her examples to one single author's work, and even that only for a few pages. In other chapters, researchers and experts are introduced, given a paragraph, and then left behind while I was left wanting to hear more about their thoughts and discoveries. Certainly Newitz had more from them; she traveled the world to do research for this book and I'm sure a single quote per interview wouldn't have justified the expenses, it's unfortunate that she couldn't find space for more extensive dialogue.
The book is very effective, however, in its approach to the various apocalyptic scenarios. This (thankfully) is not a book of conspiracies or ethical arguments. You won't find any government cabals or secret organizations working towards the end times in this book. Even the environment question is posed with a clear understanding of just how much humans effect it, one way or the other, and how, in the end, we live on a planet that has been constantly changing for billions of years with little help from humans. The topics Newitz writes about are all presented clearly, and they are all topics that are well-researched, and are definitely possible agents of human extinction. The solutions she does present are well thought out and practical.
In the end, this is not the penultimate book on the survival of humanity, but it is a book that can get you started on a very interesting, and very important topic. If you are looking for a complete exploration of post-apocalyptic humanity, this isn't quite it. But if you just realized today that any day now the big one could hit and you are wondering if other people have realized that, this is a good book for you. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

May 25, 2013 Wendy rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

When U.S. science journalist Annalee Newitz, founding editor of the science website io9.com, set out to write a book about the future of humanity, she expected to find the end was nigh.

Instead, her research led her to believe the opposite: that "humanity has a lot more than a fighting chance at making it for another million years."

The optimistic result is Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, a refreshing pop-science book that examines ways humans could prevail at Armageddon.

What does humanity's future ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 29, 2013 Sheehan rated it really liked it

Considering that most of the books I read tend to focus on the very short immediate present and future, the much longer history of the planet Earth and it's multivariate surviving species against all odds was a refreshing change.

Newitz's focus is entirely optimistic investigation of how pre-human species survived the various major planetary upheavals, and how they are relevant and applicable to humanity's future in surviving any number of extinction level events. I learned a great deal about Ear ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 05, 2013 Mike rated it liked it

Even though not all topics are fully developed (why is the vision of only one science fiction writer discussed in any depth?) or directly relevant (what exactly does the migration of the grey whale have to do with survival of mankind again?), this book is a worthwhile read for no other reason than the sense of scale and scope that it imparts. We’re talking the Big Picture here, the planetary picture, and, for many, many reasons, that picture is always changing, always evolving. Some of these cha ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 26, 2014 Doug rated it it was ok

Covers a wide range of topics...too wide...from extinction history, evolution and early human migration to genetics, space colonization, terraforming, and on and on. Consequently, each of these potentially fascinating subjects is given short shrift and broad-brush generalizations, and I felt short-changed. In addition as a geologist and chemist, there are too many factual errors here with which I can comfortably cope, and way WAY to much emphasis on consensus (real or perceived) when there is no ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2013 Emma Sea rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, auckland-library, pop-science

Pretty good: a bit light on the science in places, but eminently readable. I found Newitz too optimistic when it came to human nature. We do not make rational decisions. It was surprising that she didn't address rising sea levels at all. Yes, an asteroid is in our planet's future, but coastal flooding is in the immediate future of many of us alive now. Arguably that's not an extinction event, but neither is disease, and she covered that.

Overall, 3.5 stars, rounded down.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 27, 2014 Patrick rated it liked it

Shelves: books-read-in-2014

It's unfathomable how old the Earth is. My brain literally can't comprehend the magnitude of how long this planet has existed, and just how short a time our species has been part a part of it. Years ago, I saw a show on the History channel (or something) that explained that there were entire homo-species that came before us, lived, and died off that were around for thousands and thousands of years longer than homo sapiens have existed. That's crazy. Think about that for a second. You can't. It's It's unfathomable how old the Earth is. My brain literally can't comprehend the magnitude of how long this planet has existed, and just how short a time our species has been part a part of it. Years ago, I saw a show on the History channel (or something) that explained that there were entire homo-species that came before us, lived, and died off that were around for thousands and thousands of years longer than homo sapiens have existed. That's crazy. Think about that for a second. You can't. It's too mind-boggling to really understand.

This book does a pretty great job of breaking that concept, and other more complicated concepts, down in a way that is still staggering, but palatable. There's a lot of complicated science and numbers in this book that Newitz gracefully puts into layman terms, and a lot of off-the-wall concepts that she treats with a seriousness that a book like this requires.

The most amazing thing about this book--and there are a lot of amazing facts included--was that our entire species may begin and end in the middle of a mass extinction. That is hard to really understand, that we're part of an ecosystem that is just a weigh station for this planet's ultimate history. The entirety of human history seems staggering, until you realize just how short a timespan it really is.

That's what this book deals with, and that's it's ultimate strength and also it's biggest demerit. For someone like me, I found the concepts fascinating and Newitz does a great job writing it for someone like me who is fascinated by the concepts, but completely turned off by statistics. The strength is in putting these facts out there in a way that makes sense; the weakness is in backing those facts up with facts and figures that can't help but be a little dry. This book was like a really great college course--you enjoyed it for what it was, but at the end of the day, it was still a requirement and you wouldn't have spent your free time on it. Except that I did. So, I don't know.

I guess what I'm saying is that this book was fascinating, but I wasn't always keen to dive in. I enjoyed it, and I really think Newitz does a great job writing it for non-hardcore science people like myself. The fact that I actually finished this book is proof of that. I've read other reviews say that it should have actually been longer and dug deeper into the concepts. And those reviews are wrong. This book is the perfect length for the layman--it has a robust index for those who seek more details. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Mar 30, 2015 Tim OBrien rated it liked it

I really enjoyed the first parts of this book. She gave a good account of previous mass extinctions. And the chapter on the evolution, and near extinction of the human line was fascinating. The stories about how other species survived by scattering, adapting, and remembering were instructive. But the last part of the book, outlining some of the specific strategies that human might use to survive, was less interesting to me. But it might different for others. At one point Newitz says "...stories ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

May 13, 2013 Ian Rose rated it liked it

This was a tough one to rate. On ideas and subject matter, definitely a 5. Execution and especially editing, more like a 2-3. In the end, as impressed as I was with the research and as much as I like Newitz as a writer, speaker, and science enthusiast, I was more disappointed. The author talked to a huge variety of scientists and engineers in a lot of different fields, and I felt like we hear so little from them. Ideas came quickly on top of each other, and that's great, but they seemed to each ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 27, 2015 Miki Habryn rated it liked it

The historical treatment of extinctions and trends is solidly fascinating, but the future speculation is, necessarily, more hazy. It didn't change my ideas on our collective future chances, but it did augment dinner table conversation nicely.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 02, 2013 WolfBread rated it liked it

I bought this book because I wanted to know "How Humans will survive a mass extinction"... what I got was a lot of anthropology history, climate history, ancient jewish history, some eco-urban pipe dreams, and then finally a small serving of what I showed up for in about the last eighth of the book.

While I found all the earth history very interesting and I learned quite a bit, I wanted to know about space and our future in it and I felt like this book was not weighted proportionately towards wha ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 28, 2013 Doubleday Books rated it it was amazing

Charles Mann, author of 1491 said this: "As Walking Dead fans know, few things are more enjoyable than touring the apocalypse from the safety of your living room. Even as Scatter, Adapt, and Remember cheerfully reminds us that asteroid impacts, mega-volcanos and methane eruptions are certain to come, it suggests how humankind can survive and even thrive. Yes, Annalee Newitz promises, the world will end with a bang, but our species doesn't have to end with a whimper. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

May 08, 2016 Maire Slater rated it liked it

Shelves: 2016-05

Cyanobacteria...evolved one of the planet's greatest adaptations: photosynthesis, or the ability to convert light and water into chemical energy, releasing oxygen in the process.
Cyano has also had a secondary career as a biological building block for other life-forms. About 600 million years ago, sometime before the first multicellular life appeared, cyano began forming symbiotic relationships with other organisms, slowly merging with them over the millenia. Eventually these early cyano evolved Cyanobacteria...evolved one of the planet's greatest adaptations: photosynthesis, or the ability to convert light and water into chemical energy, releasing oxygen in the process.
Cyano has also had a secondary career as a biological building block for other life-forms. About 600 million years ago, sometime before the first multicellular life appeared, cyano began forming symbiotic relationships with other organisms, slowly merging with them over the millenia. Eventually these early cyano evolved inside other cells to become chloroplasts, tiny organs (known as organelles) that handle photosynthesis for plant cells. Every plant on Earth is, in fact, the result of this merging process. You can think of chloroplasts as both engines and batteries for plant cells; photosynthesis creates forms of energy that plants can use immediately as well as store for later. Cyano's great adaptation is so powerful that plants and even a few animals like sea anemones have survived by absorbing cyano and turning it into their own adaptation. (128)

IBM recently launched its Smarter Cities program, which is essentially a suite of software and services that the company sells to cities whose governments want to predict everything form traffic and crime patterns to the best exit strategy in a flood. The goal is to create cities whose traffic, food systems, energy grids, water management, and even health care are managed in a "smart" way, based on real-time data that reveals what's needed where. This "big data" can come from almost any networked gadgets, including sensors, mobile phones, and GPS devices. (177)

Some scientists speculate that a gamma-ray burst coming from a nearby hypernova may have abruptly ended the Ordovician period, frying the ozone layer off our atmosphere and exposing the EArth's newly diversified multicellular creatures to high doses of radiation. Creatures deep in the sea would have been protected by the radiation-absorbing water, but all the plants and light-loving swimmers near the surface would have been cooked instantly. Those not boiled to death would have been eaten away by radiation fairly quickly as the sun's ultraviolet rays beamed down on the unshielded planet. (192)

There is also overwhelming evidence that our habit of burning fossil fuels has changed the molecular composition of the air we breathe, pushing us in the direction of a greenhouse planet. (216)

We are adapted nicely to live inside the thin layer of gas surrounding the rock we call home, but in many ways that makes us terrible space travelers. First of all, the EArth's magnetic field protects us from the enormous amount of radiation in space, so our bodies never evolved a good defense against radiation damage. Solar radiation and high-energy particles would bombard our bodies on a regular basis in space and on places like the Moon and Mars, which have much weaker magnetic fields than we do at home. A person living off-world would have a high probability of developing cancer, infertility, or other radiation-induced problems. (245)

"During a long-duration manned space flight, substantial numbers of cells in a human body, [approximately] 30%, will be traversed by at least one highly ionizing particle track"..."Highly ionizing particles" are the most dangerous kind of radiation we can encounter in space - these energetic particles shoot through the body like infinitesimally small bullets, cutting through everything in their path, including tissues and DNA. The danger is that they would damage a cell's DNA but not kill the cell outright. Subsequently, the cell would replicate with mutated DNA, a situation that can lead to cancer.
(Claudia Wiese, a Lawrence Berkeley Lab geneticist) and her colleagues believe some variants of DNA-repair genes may be better at dealing with radiation damage than others, but they're nowhere near being able to tweak these genes to make humans radiation-proof. "I think that we are a long way away from gene therapy," Wiese said. "At this point, the use of appropriate countermeasures" - like drugs such as antioxidants - "may be a more immediate and feasible way to mitigate the detrimental effects of space radiation." Still, her research and that of other geneticists working with NASA suggest that we may one day know which genes control DNA repair. Once we are able to predict the behaviours of these genes, future space-farers might tweak their genes to respond quickly and effectively when bombarded with highly ionizing particles beyond Earth's protective magnetic envelope. (249)

...more

flag Like · see review

Jun 04, 2015 Tor.com added it

I actually started Newitz's book when I was near the end of Wilson's, after a chapter titled "The Collapse of Biodiversity." It was a fairly depressing portrayal of humanity's short-sightedness, so I switched over to Scatter, Adapt, and Remember for a little while, to get some additional perspective on the impending destruction of, you know, a significant amount of the Earth and its inhabitants. I saw Newitz speak about the book last year, and what struck me was her story about starting this wor ...more

flag Like · see review

May 20, 2015 Jeremy Preacher rated it really liked it

Shelves: science

This is pure science-fiction nerdnip. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a very broad book, covering a very wide range of topics and specialties and relating them to the central thesis about humanity's ability to survive in the long term. The first section is a survey of paleohistory focusing on extinction events, and very early human evolution. The middle section has some very neat examples of the titular survival strategies, from the Jewish diaspora as a successful means of genetic preservation t ...more

flag Like · see review

May 18, 2015 uberheathen rated it liked it

This book definitely had a lot of interesting things to think about, but made me interested in seeking out other books more than anything. Some ideas don't seem fully explained or fleshed out, while others are given way too many pages (there's an entire chapter on gray whales, which I love to read about, but I'm still not sure why they're even brought up here). Newitz spends a lot of time taking seriously the idea that maybe one day humans will cease to have any physical existence because we'll ...more

flag Like · see review

Nov 06, 2014 Jean-marie Kauth rated it really liked it

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition

By Jared Diamond. Penguin, 2011.

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy. Vintage, 2007.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

By Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp. Harper, 2007.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

By Annalee Newitz. Doubleday, 2013.

To be fair, The Road is not an environmental book per se, but I read the first three of these books in a series with our Scholars at Benedictine University several years ago ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 01, 2014 Nick rated it it was ok

I was really looking forward to reading this, and it starts out pretty well - the first bit explores the history of Earth, and later the human race, with an eye towards various disasters over the years, and how species succeeded or failed to adapt and survive. I found this quite interesting, and I guess a little bit reassuring, in that the cataclysm that destroys 90% of life on Earth has already happened and paved the way for us. It'd be easy to recommend this book based just on the first half, I was really looking forward to reading this, and it starts out pretty well - the first bit explores the history of Earth, and later the human race, with an eye towards various disasters over the years, and how species succeeded or failed to adapt and survive. I found this quite interesting, and I guess a little bit reassuring, in that the cataclysm that destroys 90% of life on Earth has already happened and paved the way for us. It'd be easy to recommend this book based just on the first half, but unfortunately once Newitz catches up to the modern day, the second half of the book starts and it's a complete mess.

First we hear about Newitz' favorite science fiction author for no reason I could see (unless Newitz really think that tentacle aliens from another dimension are going to come to Earth, I really don't see the point of including this part); then Newitz travels around from place to place, meeting with people who are working on future technology like a living city you can grow. This is frustrating because Newitz just scratches the surface on these ideas, never digging deep into what, for example, a living city would look like, instead telling us how the scientists who are working on these concepts dress or what they drink in the break room. I would also advise taking this entire section with a grain of salt - it all looked plausible enough to me when Newitz was recounting subjects I don't know much about, but when she got to the space elevator, I knew enough to be skeptical - she comes off as wildly over-optimistic about the chances of it ever being built (there's a reason that the material at the core of the space elevator is often referred to as "Unobtainium"). Even if you can overlook this issue, none of these ideas are tied together; some of them are mutually exclusive, and they aren't shaped into a coherent whole, instead reading more like a list of all the places Newitz was able to get an interview.

So all in all, you've got half a stinker and half a good (not great) book; I'd recommend getting it out of your local library, reading the first half, and then returning it.
...more

flag Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 99 100 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend It | Stats | Recent Status Updates

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

Nonfiction

142 users

Science

117 users

History

22 users

Anthropology

10 users

See top shelves…

About Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. She received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and in 1997 published the widely cited book, White Trash: Race and Class in America. From 2004–2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She writes for many periodicals from 'Popular Science' to 'Wired,' ...more

More about Annalee Newitz...

Books by Annalee Newitz

She's Such a Geek!: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff

Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture

More…

Share This Book

+ Share on your website

Trivia About Scatter, Adapt, a...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Scatter, Adapt, a...

“Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?” — 2 likes

“As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:

You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famine when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.... In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market acts as if it does not know you exist and does not care whether you live or die.

DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die - not out of malice , but out of indifference.” — 1 likes

More quotes…

title link	preview: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
avg rating	preview: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction Goodreads rating: 3.48 (1076 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15798335-scatter-adapt-and-remember?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1344370745l/15798335.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15798335-scatter-adapt-and-remember?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz[/url]

See a Problem?

Preview — Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

About Annalee Newitz

Books by Annalee Newitz

Share This Book

Share on your website

Trivia About Scatter, Adapt, a...

Quotes from Scatter, Adapt, a...