Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

1. In Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, translators, Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 20.2. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1985, 1986), p. 73.3. What we are describing here is the origin of our Solar System—not the origin of the Universe, or at least its latest incarnation, which is most often described as the Big Bang.4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics specifies that in any process, the net orderliness of the Universe must decrease. Some places may get more orderly as long as others get more chaotic. There is plenty of order to draw on in the Universe, and nothing in the Second Law is inconsistent with the origin of the planets or the beginnings of life.5. Except for a tiny fraction generated by the radioactive decay of atoms hailing originally from elsewhere in the Galaxy.6. Two millennia after his last worshipper died, the name of this god was given to a newly discovered planet.

Chapter 2

SNOWFLAKES FALLEN ON THE HEARTH

1. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1985, 1986), p. 72.2. In Just So Stories (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1902), p. 171.3. The image of an hour’s drive up or down is, so far as we know, originally due to the astronomer Fred Hoyle.4. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the primeval sea had just the same size and depth as our present ocean. Suppose also that the organic molecules on the primitive Earth, in the absence of any life to eat them up, lasted about 10 million years before they fell to pieces from molecular old age, or were carried down toward the Earth’s molten interior. Then, in the best case, the primitive oceans would have been about a 0.1% solution of organic matter (about the consistency of a very thin beef broth). For the whole world ocean. Some lakes, bays, and inlets may have been a much more concentrated solution of organic molecules. (Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan, “Endogenous Production, Exogenous Delivery, and Impact-Shock Synthesis of Organic Molecules: An Inventory for the Origins of Life,” Nature 355 [1992], pp. 125–132.)5. D. H. Erwin, “The End-Permian Mass Extinction,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 69–91.6. The end-Permian catastrophe was far more severe than the end-Cretaceous catastrophe some 200 million years later in which all the dinosaurs died.7. Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, IV, 48, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1964), quoted in Michael Grant, ed.,

Greek Literature: An Anthology (London and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 430.8. The Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (Historia Ecclesiastica) (London: J. M. Dent, 1910, 1935) (written in 732), Book II, Chapter XIII, p. 91.

Chapter 3

“WHAT MAKEST THOU?”