Discipline
Earth science
Lessons across the journey that lean on earth science, in the order they appear in the story.
- 2.6 The Sun, a typical starDraft
Our own star as an ordinary star, with Aditya-L1 as India's eye on it.
- 4.1 From nebula to planetsDraft
How the solar system assembled from a disc of gas and dust.
- 4.2 Earth's violent birthDraft
The Moon-forming impact and the magma ocean.
- 4.3 Core, mantle, crustDraft
Differentiation: how the Earth sorted itself into layers.
- 4.4 Plate tectonics and the HimalayaDraft
The engine of a living planet, told through the Indian plate and the rise of the Himalaya.
- 4.5 Oceans and airDraft
Where the water and the atmosphere came from.
- 4.6 Deep timeDraft
Radiometric dating: how we know the age of a rock.
- 4.7 Earth as a systemDraft
Rock, water, air and life as one connected machine.
- 5.1 What is life?Draft
Why the most obvious question in biology has no agreed answer.
- 5.2 How chemistry became biologyDraft
The hypotheses and evidence for the origin of life, and why the honest answer is that nobody knows.
- 5.3 Evolution by natural selectionDraft
The one mechanism that turns chemistry into everything else.
- 5.4 The Great Oxidation EventDraft
How life poisoned the planet, and why we breathe the waste.
- 5.5 The complex cellDraft
The merger that happened once and made everything bigger than a bacterium.
- 5.6 The Cambrian explosionDraft
Why animal bodies appear suddenly in the rocks, and whether they really appeared suddenly.
- 5.7 Mass extinctionsDraft
Five times the biosphere nearly ended, and what actually did the killing.
- 5.8 Mammals in the shadowsDraft
A hundred and fifty million years of not being important, and what happened when the competition vanished.
- 9.1 The next century: climateDraft
The range of plausible futures narrowed at both ends, and almost nobody noticed.
- 9.5 Leaving EarthDraft
Space is one of the most valuable things we do, and almost all of its value points back at Earth.
- 9.6 The deep futureDraft
Earth has about a billion years of biosphere left, not five, and that is only the first paragraph.