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NOTES FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD
Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows What once was known is forgotten again, lost in ties later
Millennia ago, the ancient Maya studied the movement of stars and developed a calendar that has not lost a day in 2,500 years It was an astronomical feat that would take ht of the Byzantine Eed dramatically with the invention of Greek fire, an incendiary weapon that could not be put out by dousing it ater The recipe for e flammable concoction was lost by the tenth century and wouldn’t be rediscovered until its closest counterpart, napalm, was created in the 1940s
How did such knowledge become lost to antiquity? One exaendary Library of Alexandria was burned to ashes The library, founded in roughly 300 BC in Egypt, was said to have held over a e like no other It drew scholars from around the knoorld The cause of its fiery destruction remains a mystery Some blame Julius Caesar, who set fire to Alexandria’s docks; others attribute its ruin toArab conquerors Still, what is certain is that those flae froes, lost forever
But soes is a story of one of those dark erous that it could never be fully lost
NOTES FROM THE SCIENTIFIC RECORD
Life on this planet has always been a balancing act—a coile Reins to fray and fall apart
Such a collapse—or ical past The first struck four hundred o, when most marine life died off The third event hit both land and sea at the end of the Per out 90 percent of the world’s species, co all life on earth The fifth andin the era ofthe world forever
How close are we to seeing such an event happen again? Some scientists believe we’re already there, neck-deep in a sixth o extinct, totaling over thirty thousand a year Worst of all, the rate of this die-off is continually rising At this very moment, nearly half of all amphibians, a quarter of all e of extinction Even a third of all conifer trees teeter at that brink
Why is this happening? In the past, such lobal climate or shifts in plate tectonics, or in the case of the dinosaurs, possibly even an asteroid strike Yet most scientists believe this current crisis has a si of the environ force behind the loss ofto a report by Duke University released in May 2014, human activity has driven species into extinction at the rate a thousandfold faster than before the arrival of modern man
But what is less well known concerns a new danger to all life on earth, one that has risen out of the ancient past and threatens to accelerate this current die-off, to possibly push us beyond the brink, to take us to the point of apocalypse
And not only is that threat very real—it’s rising right now out of our own backyards
December 27, 1832