About:

Life's Struggle to Survive

John C Baez, Univeristy of California, Riverside

When pondering our future amid global warming, it is worth remembering how we got here.  Even after it got started, the success of life on Earth was not a foregone conclusion!  In this talk John Baez recounted some thrilling, chilling episodes from the history of our planet. For example: our collision with the planet Theia, the "snowball Earth events" when most of the oceans froze over, and the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs. Some are well-documented, others only theorized, but pondering them may give us some optimism about the ability of life to survive crises.