If you imagine the 4, 500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. . Bill Bryson
About This Quote

Life in the universe is incredibly dynamic. It's amazing that there are any creatures at all. It is also amazing that they have survived to the present day. Life has endured for billions of years, but even the longest-lived of species are not immortal.

The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, but only our species is still around. Evolution has allowed life to survive, but life has not been able to survive in all conditions or in all places. For example, some species have adapted to living in the hot oceans near geothermal vents, while others have adapted to living in cold polar regions.

A few species have adapted to living in the ocean's depths, others have adapted to living on land, and still others have adapted to living both on land and underwater. Some species have adapted to live on land or on sea while some species have adapted to live both on land and underwater. Some species need air and water while other species do not need air or water at all.

Source: A Short History Of Nearly Everything

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More Quotes By Bill Bryson
  1. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only...
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  3. As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?
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