The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), quoted in The Making of Optical Glass in India, Proceedings of the National Institute of Sciences of India (1961) When we look back over the 4.5 billion years or so that the Earth has been around, the vast majority of life-threatening disasters that have brought a form of Armageddon to the world have been natural rather than man-made. This is hardly surprising when you consider the mere pinprick in time that is Homo sapiens’ portion of the Earth’s existence. Allowing a very generous million years (most figures put the emergence of Homo sapiens between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago), we have been around for one 4,500th of the life of the Earth. Humanity’s significant civilizations have existed for about a millionth of the lifetime of the Earth. This means that we have, so far, missed out on the megadisasters that have resulted in mass extinctions of species. Looking back in time, using the fossil record as a time telescope, it is possible to deduce events, known as extinction events, when immense swaths of life were wiped out on the Earth.
