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

by Annalee Newitz

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Audiobook, Environment, Nature, Anthropology

305 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. They 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 they were a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They write for many periodicals from 'Popular Science' to 'Wired,' and from 1999 to 2008 wrote a syndicated weekly column called 'Techsploitation.' They co-founded 'other' magazine in 2002, which was published triannually until 2007. Since 2008, they are editor-in-chief of 'io9,' a Gawker-owned science fiction blog, which was named in 2010 by The Times as one of the top science blogs on the internet.

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've thought long and hard about what to say about this book. As you can see from my rating, I wasn't overly thrilled. While the topic is quite fascinating, the author brought nothing new to the table. Then again, this could be someone else's first book of this kind and then it would all be "new".

The basic topic is that of humanity's continued existence and what we should do to ensure it. In order to be able to assess the options, one should also look at our species' and planet's past to see what has worked and what hasn't throughout evolution.
For example: the homo neanderthalensis were big and strong but not as smart as homo sapiens and while we know by now that the former has not in fact died out but produced hybrids with the latter, I'd still say the winner is h. sapiens.
The sabre-toothed tiger was an impressive prehistoric monster of a cat but very picky when it came to eating while the mountain lion (aka cougar) was smaller but more adaptable. Guess which one is still around.

So yeah, the bottom line is that humans will have to be able to adapt to their circumstances - be it by building more sustainable cities, using energy sources other than oil, or even genetic changes.
Some will no doubt struggle with that but the good news is that there are so many of us that it won't matter.
And, of course, the author makes a point about us needing to go to the stars. Think of other habitable planets (or uninhabitable ones where we use scifi tech) as our ancestors must have thought of other continents. -ish.

We are therefore taken through Earth's history, read about the mass extinctions, get the author's (and some scientist's) take on whether or not we are currently living through one, then follow the Jews' exodus (the biblical one as much as the real-life one) to emphasize the need to get a move on in some situations, and generally hear a lot of stuff that is very general and very upbeat (often a bit too much, see my status update about the author's opinion on our population's current numbers).

What this book definitely LACKED was interesting speculation about what we could do and how. We got an itsy-bitsy tiny little bit towards the end of the book but considering the title, that was definitely far too little.

Look, I totally understand that one needs to lay out some basic principles to make a point but if your look at the past is about 75% (or more) of the book that is supposed to be about humanity's future, then you've done it wrong.

Moreover, many things were expressed in a sensationalist kind of way and it irked me. I get that the author apparently is very optimistic about where we are as a species and that what we do to the planet is not as bad as some alarmists might believe, but I still expect better writing.

Too bad, really, because I had been looking forward to geeking out over possible ways to scatter and adapt. Instead, I got buried in all the remembering.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 gotten this far in (about three-quarters of the way), because I was just getting too annoyed. Life's too short to feel irritated and restless when reading for fun. For example, Newitz spends five pages recapping the narrative and themes of an Octavia Butler science fiction distopian novel in order to prove a point about something that became more and more elusive as she went on. In another section she cites plot points from the movie Contagion to further her ideas about combating infectious. Now, I'm all for breezy treatments of complicated, even harrowing subjects, but Newitz isn't kidding around here. These (and their ilk) are her sole sources, dryly delivered. Plus: she can barely conceal her contempt at the very notion of "the city". Maybe you'll like Scatter, etc. (Amazon sure did, giving it a "Best of May" trophy), but I definitely did not.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up in heavy anticipation because I've already read two of her SF novels. I thought to myself, HEY! We're going to get some cool speculation and have it backed up by science... right?

Ah, well, a bit. At the end.

Instead, we mainly focus on well-established extinction events from the past, a slightly optimistic, slightly rose-tinted outlook at life on geological scales, and the basic insistence that extinction happens over a great scale of time. Colony collapses are recoverable, mostly, over the long-run. Roger. That's pretty much standard science, but it has been used to argue both sides of the pessimistic fence in many different venues. I simplify, but let me be honest: these subjects are handled with more detail and slightly better writing in places such as The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Yuval Noah Harari's of Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari: An Unofficial Summary and Analysis and Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow. There are quite a few books that have a slightly more comprehensive optimistic outlook to offset the more alarmist (such as Sixth Extinction.)

I can understand why so much of this particular book needed to ground itself in past collapses in order to set the stage for coping strategies, but how it worked out here was kinda strange. Most were background stuff with old-hat science and the rest was just a small taste of the truly juicy bits.

If I was a little more cussed about it, I'd recommend reading Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, starting with The Three-Body Problem for some really juicy survival mechanisms. :)

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

As other reviewers had said, I wanted more speculation on the future and less coverage of the past, particularly the past mass extinctions that went before the one that we are probably going through right now.

I did find much of the book fascinating and well worth a read for its optimistic outlook on the future of humanity (which paints a grim outlook on individual lives but a more positive forecast on us as a species), although the section on pandemics did not age well, because it seems that the one thing epidemiologists and algorithms failed to compute for was the absolute stupidity and self-centered natures of capitalist and individualist-based societies.

[Wanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 talks about the various climate changes earth has gone through over the ages.

The second part covers the history of mankind upon the earth. The amateur paleontologist in me was hooked and I couldn’t stop reading! I could be a Neanderthal descendant. This part talks about extinction from plagues and famine.

Part three is about how people in the past have survived mass extinction threats. Now this is where I’m grateful that this book is NOT just another load of conspiracy theories spouting off that we’re all going to die (except for the rich who can afford to live in fortified underground bunkers and bribe God into not doing them in).

How to build a death-proof city, part four, covers wondrous scientific and engineering feats that have been and are still being developed to make our residences survival havens and more disaster proof. I think the thing I liked most about this section is the doing away with the city mouse vs. country mouse. And melding the two into one location is simply smart by any standard. Being self sufficient should never become a lost art. This section also discusses the underground cities in Turkey, which is what captured my interest in this book in the first place; Fascinating stuff.

And part five is about all the diverse ways we can save our planet and ourselves from mass extinctions. The author did an excellent job discussing scientific and engineering subject so that anybody can understand.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Gendou · Rating 2 out of 5]

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, it was condescending to the reader:

* Colony Collapse Disorder is not best described as "the extinction of bees"
* Synapsids are not "mammal/reptile hybrids"
* The Technological Singularity should not be referred to as an "intelligence explosion"

The author also gives wacko theories by fringe nutters like Gerta Keller, Ray Kurzweil, Rachel Armstrong, etc. This vague, magical speculation about a science-fiction future clashes with the science-fact history, and left me feeling uncomfortable. Fantasies like building living cities using synthetic biology, Geo-engineering to fight climate change, and adapting humans for life in space are far less interesting to me than, say, the realistic goal of detecting and diverting near-Earth asteroids. But even the chapter on near-Earth asteroids left most of the science out.

There is a Sagan-like theme of mankind going into space which is also, sadly lacking. She mentions space elevators but doesn't go into any detail. I really was hoping to read more about that. Also, the cover of the book seems to show a house on the moon. Where was the chapter about moon colonies?! Come on, Annalee!

If you want to listen to a girl with sexy hair ramble about what she read in science news lately, read this book.

If you're looking for real science, look elsewhere.

[First Second Books]

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.

[Jaylia3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mass extinctions have decimated our planet on a regular bases throughout its history. p4

This book is about how we have survived mass extinctions so far. But it is also about the future and what we need to do to make sure humans don't perish in the next one. p1

Can humans possibly expect to remain unchanged....? History suggests that it's unlikely....Survival may be far weirder and better than we ever imagined. p55

Because she is so damn personable, it's hard to repudiate Annalee Newitz. I do love the way she romps the reader through the five currently documented extinction events. She fills in many of the blanks left from an inadequate schooling and I had to marvel at the picture that emerges from the way she has presented the material. Not only are we descended from apes, we are "slime world survivors" p38 The illustration of the Lystosaurus may somewhat explain why most of us have never considered this medium size, rather repellent looking reptile who was the dominant creature on earth for about 8 million years, but that does nothing to excuse the educational system. Of course maybe things are changing with research so available on all these issues.
The trick is to know what you are looking for but keep open to stuff that may seem extraneous, an eye on the bigger picture as well as the bottom line. AN does this with flair.

Whether you believe that humans exterminated or assimilated Neanderthals depends a lot on what you believe about your species. {were the earliest homo sapiens} more likely to kill and rape their way across Europe in a Neanderthal holocaust, rather than making nice with the locals....p85

AN is a fan of progress and attributes the ability to adapt to changing circumstances as the key survival strategy. She also credits storytelling and the vital role it plays in community survival.
Chillingly, there is a whole chapter on Plague that is of special interest today, written as it was in 2013. In fact, AN holds a more balanced POV than the hysterical conjectures of the mass media. It seems clear to me that a pernicious underlying optimism fuels this work.

If we are in the early days of a mass extinction, the main thing that sets it apart from the five previous is that we have the ability to stop it. p59

Provocative and persuasive as she may be, this is where we part ways. Even as we both hold out for the hope that we can still halt an utter cataclysm, I would have us ditch the military industrial, progress and profit model and establish world peace whereupon we would be free to make the necessary rearrangements for reestablishing harmony and ensuring that all beings be able to thrive etc etc. AN would have us ditch this doomed plant and pour all our resources into establishing colonies in space where humanity could take refuge in whatever form required, to the point of merging with the machines.

The main problem is that we can't experiment on human beings the way we do with bacteria. p247

Predators are as much at the mercy of prey as the reverse. p41

[K R N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook and really liked the narrator (5 stars for the narration part also).

This was *incredibly* interesting to read during the covid-19 pandemic. It goes chronologically from distant history, to more recent history, to the present, future, and distant future.

The recent-history parts about the Black Death, and her discussion of epidemics - written in 2012 - was fascinating from today's perspective. There are striking similarities between the ways the Black Death went down and what is happening now (although thankfully death rates are very different), including people demanding higher wages afterward, cities and vulnerable groups, societal upheaval, etc. She says things like "you can imagine it's like the movie ___" and then describes roughly what just happened IRL.

Later, once she gets to the present and future, it was eerie to read about possible future pandemics, "social distancing," and other now-common terms, from the perspective of 2012 and it being somewhat far-fetched. It seems prescient, while being slightly sad because one can see how optimistic she was that we were somewhat prepared (experts certainly were) and would simply use the preventative tools and solutions at our disposal. If only it were that simple.

I guess the other parts are similarly rose-tinted, with her assurance that we have the tools to grapple with a variety of future disasters, and yet it was super interesting to read as a broad overview of what is possibly down the road and what it might look like. It is clearly the tip of the iceberg on many of these topics, and I appreciated how she brought it together for someone unfamiliar with much of it.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 Earth's many major collapses and how as the titles states, some combination of scattering, adapting and retaining workable strategies were instrumental in at least some lifeforms navigating a path to the next vastly different era of Earth's life.

The last third of the book is reminiscent of my favorite science fiction as a youth, a very hopeful examination of modern ideas that could actually get us off Earth, or at least bunker down IN the earth long enough to rise again in whatever evolved format we achieve to persevere the adversity.

Considering how much I obsess about survival prep for the seemingly huge scary lifetime events, this book expands the perspective away from individual life issues and solutions, to much more grand collective survival questions as a species...very successfully.

The book is well-written and researched; a fun read I would recommend it to anyone interested in futurism.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.)

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hope is in short supply these days but this book is a good source of comfort (even as it describes all the previous mass extinctions and stuff).

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will the human race survive climate change?

Come what may, the human race is heading toward a fall.

As Berkeley Ph.D. Annalee Newitz writes, “the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history . . . Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions, during which more than 75 percent of the species on Earth died out. And yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive under the harshest conditions.”

In Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Newitz explores what humankind must do to be among the survivors of the next mass extinction. Because, as she emphasizes, there will inevitably be a next time. If the current acceleration in species death — think honeybees and frogs — isn’t an early stage of a full-blown mass extinction, something else really, really bad will surely happen sooner or later. Thus it is, Newitz insists, “we need a long-term plan to get humanity off Earth. We need cities beyond the Blue Marble, oases on other worlds where we can scatter to survive even cosmic disasters.”

For me, as a long-time science fiction reader (and once-upon-a-time sf writer), this assertion is not news. Nor are the apocalyptic scenarios she paints, with massive asteroids or comets crashing into the Earth, megavolcanos blanketing the Earth with soot and ash that trigger an Ice Age, bursts of cosmic radiation frying all life on the planet, an incurable contagious disease gone pandemic, or, worst of all — here’s the surprise — climate change.

Yes, it turns out that the worst of the half-dozen mass extinctions science has brought to light “involved climate change similar to the one our planet is undergoing right now.” During that distant period, around 250 million years ago, “95 percent of all species on the planet were wiped out over a span of roughly 100,000 years . . .” And lest you take comfort in the hope that our brush with such a catastrophe lies in the distant future, please note that some in the scientific community date the beginning of the current mass extinction to a time about 15,000 years ago when human invaders from Asia began to exterminate the giant fauna of the Americas (mammoths, giant elk, sloths, and other species).

Newitz, a science journalist and award-winning blogger, divides Scatter, Adapt, and Remember into four sections. In Part I, she surveys the history of mass extinctions. Part II focuses on homo sapiens‘ close calls — from the population bottlenecks in the earliest days of our species in Africa a million years ago, to our recent competition with Neanderthals and homo erectus, to the horrific pandemics that have lowered our numbers, to the widespread incidence of famine throughout our history. In Part III, Newitz examines the successful strategies employed by homo sapiens and other species (including microbes and gray whales) to survive in the face of existential threats. These strategies give the book its title: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. Part IV makes the case that humanity will only survive in cities and explains “How to Build a Death-Proof City” in which every surface is used to grow food. Part V looks to the far future — a million years or more — with humanity spreading out to the stars.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember features excerpts from the author’s face-to-face interviews with scientists working on the frontiers of exploration in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, materials science, and many other contemporary fields. There’s scarcely a chapter without a smattering of references to working scientists. Newitz’s views emerge from a solid base of understanding of the latest findings in a wide range of scientific inqiury.

However, Newitz also reveals her love for science fiction by drawing ideas and examples from the work of some of the craft’s most celebrated writers (as do many practicing scientists and engineers, not so incidentally). In particular, she calls out the work of the late Octavia Butler to illustrate the ethical quandaries posed by the threat of extinction in one possible far future for humanity.

Alternately troubling and inspiring, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is ultimately an intrinsically hopeful proposition from a brilliant young visionary. Annalee Newitz is a name to watch.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 look like? You might be surprised: Newitz, who is based in California, thinks it looks like Saskatoon.

The Saskatchewan city "has survived despite its hard climate, and people there have found ways to incorporate the latest scientific advances into their agriculture and urban design without overspending," she writes in the introduction to the book's Canadian edition.

Scatter, Adapt and Remember is not a manual; it will not help you duck and cover or stock your survival shelter.

Rather, Newitz takes a page from Alan Weisman's 2010 book, The World Without Us -- which conjured the changes coming to a depopulated world -- and imagines instead how Homo sapiens can survive whatever attempts to depopulate us, be it nuclear war, plague, asteroid, or some other curse we have not imagined or invented.

Newitz begins with a review of the history of mass extinctions on Earth -- from the Proterozoic microbes of 2.5 billion years ago through dinosaurs and whales and Neanderthals. The book is at its driest here, a sort of super-condensed Brief History of Everything, with a special focus on dying.

By the middle of the book we're considering the lessons previous mass extinctions -- and their survivors -- have taught, the lessons of the book's title: scatter, to escape adversity as best you can; adapt as the world around you changes, and remember: pass on the knowledge of how to survive.

It's worth enduring the rather arid history lesson at the beginning to get to Parts 4 and 5, where Newitz is at her most speculative. Here she really leave Weisman far in the dust, imagining how humanity will survive a million years into the future, perhaps as part-robot, or perhaps living on the Moon, on Mars, or beyond.

"Our kids are the last generation who will see no city lights on the Moon," predicts a NASA scientist, one of a hundred fascinating experts Newitz interviews.

Did you know the United Nations has an "action team" on the "Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space" that would co-ordinate Earth's defences if an asteroid appears to be headed our direction? Scatter, Adapt and Remember will help you rest easy, safe in the knowledge that someone out there is working hard to keep space rocks from killing us all.

By the time you get to the end of the book, you might find yourself downloading CD3WD, a "backup copy of everything history has taught us about creating an early industrial society."

Stored on a few DVDs or (perhaps more practically) printed and secured in your post-apocalypse survival kit, it'll help you rebuild human civilization from scratch -- just in case the future goes a bit sideways.

"Things are going to get weird," Newitz concludes. "But don't worry. As long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive."

Review published in Winnipeg Free Press: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts...

[Dan Barr · Rating 3 out of 5]

*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.

[Lianne Burwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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, and it does show how human society deals with massive die-offs (human only). Ditto for colonialism.

Then it goes into what could kill lots of people off. Radiation from space, pandemics, and that sort of stuff. Humans will have to live underground. Humans need to redesign cities for better sustainability.

But there's really not much looking at if we really are in a mass extinction, or at the things we might be able to do to help the environment avoid a mass extinction, or help it repair afterwards. Instead, it was just yet another book about possible cataclysms and how prepared we are for it (see Philip Plait's Death From the Skies, for example).

So while I enjoyed the book, it just wasn't the book it promised, so that knocked it down a star.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 changes have lead to six mass extinctions. But change is also what might, just might, enable our continued existence of our species into the far distant future. The author points out, for example, that birds evolved feathers millions of years before they started flying, and animals had limbs long before they started walking. I love the implication. We already possess the means to survive this technological adolescence of ours. We already possess the means to save ourselves.

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 none.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written but inaccurate. Too bad my 2014 note doesn't say what she got wrong. At a guess, drinking the climate-change kool-aid.

See Scott's review, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
for more details. I did finish it, but was annoyed. 2.5 stars for me, rounded down for the stuff he said. Not recommended.

[Gronk · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of the book I thoroughly enjoyed. I wasn't aware of some of the mass extinctions our planet has seen and it was fascinating. The second half of the book was a bore. I'm just not interested in how we might develop new technologies to get off the planet or upload our brains into cyberspace. Nor did I expect quite a bit of discussion of SF literature.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book of science fact and science fiction that covers everything from ancient algae to pandemic preparation, underground cities, and the future evolution of humanity. Lots of cool stuff here although it all feels slightly disjointed to me - all the threads aren’t quite woven together into a satisfying whole. It feels more like a series of vignettes- in audio it was like listening to a bunch of podcasts - than a completely integrated book. Still, that’s kind of a nitpick- I’d certainly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the deep future of humanity.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly interesting and unusual collection of research, the results of interviews with a great variety of experts and a pinch of science fiction. It reaches from the beginnings of Earth and living organisms to scenarios in the far future. Even though this book is about catastrophic scenarios which threaten to kill us all, it actually inspires hope that we are going to survive in some way.

[Wendy Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of positivity, this light book is a great comfort read. The information about previous mass extinctions and evolution was deftly handled, and the research always felt thorough and interesting. Sometimes the writing felt a bit forced, but overall, just the thing to ease my existential angst.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[MaryJo · Rating 4 out of 5]

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--as an alternative to current space programs that use rockets. Or to imagine how humans might evolve into new species that would have about the same resemblance to who we are now as we do to Neanderthal man. The chapters are short and well written. Because a lot of what the author does in the book is to interview scientists, she captures their individual voices and their enthusiasm for their projects. This makes it a much more lively book, than if she had summarized all of the views in her own voice. I can't say that I was convinced that technology has the answers, but even knowing about these debates expands my horizons.