|
A short history of nearly everythingBut even if our visitors were oxygen-breathing bipeds with shopping malls and a fondness for action movies, it is unlikely that they would find Earth ideal. We couldnБЂ™t even give them lunch because all our foods contain traces of manganese, selenium, zinc, and other elemental particles at least some of which would be poisonous to them. To them Earth might not seem a wondrously congenial place at all. The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke about a posteriori conclusions, as they are called. БЂњYou know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,БЂ« he would say. БЂњI saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!БЂ« His point, of course, was that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.So it is possible that the events and conditions that led to the rise of life on Earth are not quite as extraordinary as we like to think ...» |
Код для вставки книги в блог HTML
phpBB
текст
|
|