Death on Earth Quotes

“(‘And so the price of immortality is our humanity,’ concludes Nick Lane in Life Ascending).”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality

“People like a villain,’ he said almost matter-of-factly. ‘If you can take a story and make it about a villain, especially if it’s potentially life-threatening, then people listen.”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality

“In front of my eyes, watching those pigs, I was watching nature denature itself and spontaneously renature itself into something else. And this is what has happened to almost every animal that has ever lived (until recently, when humans opted out by choosing cremation, selfishly starving many thousands of beautiful rove beetles in the process).”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality

“In humans, statistically, once we reach 30 years of age our chance of dying doubles approximately once every eight years. It’s as simple as that.”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality

“we take energy from the sun (albeit by eating plants that have taken energy from the sun or animals that have eaten plants) and we produce heat. We make a highly disordered form of energy (heat) from an ordered one (light). We are part of the chaos, in other words – as well as paying the universe for the thrill of living, we also help maintain its universal tendency toward chaos. We fit right in. As absurd as it sounds, you and I are nothing more than heat pumps (though some pump more heat than others).”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality

“How does the living organism avoid decay?’ This is the question Schrödinger attempted to tackle in What is Life? And the answer, he realised, is that it pays. To temporarily avoid death throughout their life, animals must pay. They must invest energy. In this respect, their cells and cell processes are like career librarians, holding back the chaos. Pushing against inevitability. Eventually the cost will become too high and they cease to be, of course – they die.”
― Jules Howard, Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality