Becoming Earth Quotes

“The universe is indifferent to us, moving inexorably towards a state of maximum entropy in which living planets like ours - in which life of any kind - will be impossible. Earth is a beautiful rebellion and a precarious miracle: a garden in the void.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life

“Historically, evolution has been depicted as linear and branching, like a tree, or cross-linked, like a web. Although those metaphors certainly capture many evolutionary processes, others are much more sinuous—even circular. Again and again, life and environment alter each other through feedback loops. Through their behaviors and byproducts, living creatures make lasting changes to their surroundings that partly determine the fate of their descendants and of other species. Microbes can seed clouds. Forests on one continent can make it rain on another. Breath can sway a planet.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, today’s global crop harvest would be halved and two out of every five people currently alive would not exist.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“To recognize that deep subsurface life not only exists but is also engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth—that it may have helped create the very crust it inhabits and on which all terrestrial life stands—is to redefine the modern understanding of how our planet came to be.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Together, the theory goes, grasses and megafauna created and regulated the mammoth steppe ecosystem.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“More than half of all minerals on the planet can occur only in a high-oxygen environment, which did not exist before microbes, algae, and plants oxygenated the ocean and atmosphere.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“The water in which D. audaxviator was discovered had not been disturbed for tens of millions of years at a minimum, suggesting that a population of these daring microbial terranauts may have sustained itself for at least as long.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“microbial life existed at least 3.5 billion years ago and possibly as far back as 4.2 billion years ago.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxygen.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“As Earth system scientist Tim Lenton has written, he and his colleagues “now think in terms of the coupled evolution of life and the planet, recognizing that the evolution of life has shaped the planet, changes in the planetary environment have shaped life, and together they can be viewed as one process.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“The planet was no longer perceived as an immense living being worthy of veneration but rather a body of inanimate resources waiting to be exploited.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffusing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue, and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which protected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radiation.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“We and other living creatures are more than inhabitants of Earth; we are Earth—an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles. Earth and its creatures are so closely intertwined that we can think of them as one.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“the Amazon contributes to rainfall in places as far away as Canada.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“In a typical year, the Amazon generates around half of its own rainfall.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Life and its environment evolve together, too. Darwinian evolution by natural selection happens through changes to the genetic composition of populations whose members vary in their traits. Those individuals best able to survive and reproduce in their particular environment leave behind the most offspring and pass on the genes coding for the very traits that made them so successful. Generation by generation, those genes and traits become more common in the overall population.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“oceanic crust is composed of basalt, a cosmically common rock. Basalt is dark, dense, and rich in magnesium and iron, a particularly heavy metal. More”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“The continents are made of granite, which, as far as we know, is abundant only on Earth—it has rarely been found anywhere else in the universe.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Finding a multicellular animal of that size and complexity living in a trickle of water so deep within the planet’s crust was, Onstott said, like “finding Moby Dick swimming around in Lake Ontario.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals, and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the groundwork for all other terrestrial life.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life

“German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt characterized nature as a “living whole” in which organisms were connected by a “net-like intricate fabric.”
― Ferris Jabr, Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life