Register or on a website or you can get on a mailing list. Come at the next couple nights, tomorrow night Legendary Music writer rick berlin will be talking about his latest book about boston music scene. And then on whats today, monday . Wednesday night Sarah Moriarty will be out with her debut novel in north haven and on and on so please come back. Peter brannen is a journalist writing about science, not religion. So the ends of the world he is writing about are not armageddon but massive extension that occurred over the last halfbillion years of the worlds history. You will notice the book is entitled the ends of the world added to think im getting way too much when i take that the world has basically ended five times in the last halfbillion years and thats not even counting last november. [laughing] peter was born and raised i have a kind of jokes here. [laughing] ill be back again at 11. [laughing] peter was born and raised outside boston, graduated from boston college. I learned from his website that is a placental mammal. [laughing] it was on the internet. His work has appeared in the new york times, atlantic, washington post, wired, slate, the guarding among others. He was a 2015 journalist in residence at duke, dukes National Center and at 2011 Ocean Science journalism fellow. He got his start as reporter for the gazette. As you will hear his book tells us we can learn a lot from geologic history about what to be scared of but also perhaps some small ways in which we can find ourselves slightly optimistic or at least not terrified. Please join in giving a warm welcome to peter brannen. [applause] thanks everyone for coming. This is a great turnout. Im very honored that you all showed up. I figured that since i am in the boston okay. There we go. I figured i would start with a boston themed reading which comes early in the book to set the stage where i talk about kind of some thoughts that are a little controversial but i just roll with it. All right. It starts. Im from boston. Conveniently this means its only a short commuter ferry ride across the harbor to see what might be some of the earliest fossils of large complex life in the history of the planet. Marina with the condos is a beach studded with a rusty spikes of some bygone wharf. At the far end of the neglected beach bowtied reveals ancient seafloor draped in seaweed sloping into the sea. The rocks in the bottom of the ocean off the coast of a supercontinent near the south pole lookout not far from the bed bath and got popular. Ayes dimension wahlburgers but figured no one knew what that was outside of boston. There were more than half a billion years old. The plaque marker indicates theres anything particularly interesting about them. Brushing back to rock reveals concentric ovals no larger than a quarter to pop the service of the stem. The anderson rings in the rock might mark the imprint where a first shaped creature anchored itself to the slimy silt at the bottom of the ocean at the thought of complex life. This is where the story starts. On a planet that shares our name but thats about it. Its impossible to grasp how long ago these creatures lights on the antarctic boston c4. Its impossible to grasp how old the planet is not insignificant the role of humanity has played. Carl sagan helped illustrate how utterly marooned with our in our tiny are flung corner of space. We are marooned in time between incomprehensible eternities. Luckily geologists have come up with mental tricks to help us. One of them involves a footstep analogy echo Something Like the following. Imagine eac it to be decrepitud0 years of history. The simple conceit as to the fight implications. Lets begin our walk. Well start in the present and head back. As you lift up your heels theres no internet, onethird of the earths core reappear. Taliban finally reassembled come to world wars are fought in reverse pick the electric glow in the knights of the is extinguished and when your foot plant the Ottoman Empire exists. One step. After 20 steps you stroll by jesus. A few paces later the other great religions begin to go out of existence. With each footbal footballer cul milestones get more staggering. First Legal Systems and writing disappear and then tragically so does beer. After only a few dozen steps to 40 can reach the end of the block all of reported his tribute of, all of civilization the gadget and woolly mammoths exist. That was easy. You stretch your legs and perhaps prepare for what couldnt be much longer a walk. Perhaps its a short tilt of the dinosaurs of further still to the kilobytes. You get the formation of the earth by sundown, not so. In fact, you have to keep walking 20 miles a day every day for four years to cover the rest of the plants history. Then theres little footnote to reach the big bang to have to keep doing that for almost another decade. Cleared the story of the earth is at the story of homo sapiens. Almost all of that walk would be through a forbidding landscape with no complex life on it whatsoever. Not in the deep sea, not atop the mountains, not in the tropics on the endless bernd granted interiors of the continents. Save for the wind and the waves, ours was a site plan for the most part during this nearly eternal preamble to him alive. Those first creatures stand in the rocks a Boston Harbor and elsewhere came after 4 billion years on earth without anything on the typeface of the plan more exciting than pond scum. In fact, views between 1. 85850 million to years ago were so uneventful that even geologists have taken to referring them as the boring billy. When a geologist call something boring, wheel in horror. As a search liferaft of the plants this is something to keep in mind. Even the earth was a desolate wasteland for 90 of its history. One of the only signs of life in the rock record for billions of years is the presence of an inspiring amounts of fossilized microbial slime. Then you read 635 known years ago a tiny whisper of complex life, rocks found in oman their 24 isopropyl, stain, ive never had to sit outline, a mouthful of the chemical that todays produce only by certain sponges. As the smithsonian stucker when rice humanity owes a special debt to sponges. Something to keep in mind the next time youre using one to wipe bacon grease off a fan. Then around 579 million years ago during the eed akron. After a spell of sterilizing global ice ages aptly called snowball earth the champagne bottle of life was in court and large complex creatures finally and suddenly appear as fossils on the ancient floor. Though this is recent history in the 4,500,000,000 year lifespan of the planet, it still unspeakably old, or than 200 million years before the supercontinent pangaea symbol to more than 500 million years before t rex. At five and a second million years ago with a 5 9 million years before modern humans whose hoosiers on the plan are measured in hundreds of thousands rather than millions of years. Even for geologist these past all understanding. So i figured that would be a good way to set the stage of what sort of timestamp were talking about, and so the first, im ignoring the boring billions for good reason. I think some geologists would that be too thrilled about that but this book focuses on the last halfbillion years when we have had things that we would recognize as wildlife. Fish in the ocean, at some point life comes onto land. You have trees and you start to build these ecosystems. This is the age of animal life in the age of mass extinction. There is five times in last halfbillion years when the majority of life on the planet goes extinct and what is geologically a very brief period of time. At the most this was a few tens of thousands of years. We know from rock dating, and it couldve been only a few thousand years, they could even a few centuries. Its hard to tell. The most recent one of these, just give you some perspective, was 66 million years ago. This is also the most famous one. This is a mass extinction that takes out the nonbird dinosaurs. We we still have bird dinosaurs, birds. So this i this is a most famous. As one knows an asteroid hit in 1980 Walter Alvarez and his dad lose alvarez at uc berkeley discovered what is essentially a layer of asteroid dust in the layers between the age of dinosaurs in the age of mammals. In the early 90s paleontologists identified a 1an peninsula in mexico. You had this very unique story was starting to come together the reason why dinosaurs and most of life on earth at the time went extinct, the big marine reptiles, most mammals come these big things called ammonites that are select squid like things, this toy made sense that you have this asteroid that hit, and most life on earth goes extinct. So Popular Culture notice this. In the early 90s a lot of baboons came out like deep impact and armageddon. The reason why i voted this sort is because in the popular imagination that sister of mass extinction. Theres these things happen when asked which of the planet. In the last 30 years since then a totally different story has emerged that i didnt think it really reached the public yet. It had, but i wanted to add my voice to this. So its as if it was a most mass extinction was one that took up the took out the dinosaurs. These really alien worlds that you dont hear much about, people always ask me what went extinct . Its hard to describe because they really are unfamiliar worlds. You have this world of alternate universe of crocodile relatives that goes extinct in the triacid, some of them wouldve been on two legs and eating, or plant eaters and others where these athletic predators and dinosaurs were there. Before that you have these, another alternate universe of protomammals reptiles, these things would eventually one line would become mammals but most of them were these deadend, weird, somewhere rino like with tasks and other ones were sort of wolf or tige tiger like. That all gets destroyed. Mass extinction before that, youre this world of big armored fish. These things are sort of like deep teens for miles and his bony armored heads. Its hard to summarize this stuff. In the book i do my best over a few hundred pages. Then as you get to the oldest mass extinction that happen 445 million years ago and it does look like anything today. Theres a vast ocean in the northern news there, almost no plan at all. Africa is over the south pole because the life on land at all. In the ocean theres hardly any fish and is dominated by this world of sort of creepy crawlers, a lot of chemicals and things that look like horseshoe crabs. These worlds were all just of the dinosaur world was destroyed, these worlds were abated by catastrophe. Armed with the knowledge that it seems like a pretty, the picture was pretty clear that asked which can wipe out the world, so this book was called mass extinction. Geologists have gone back looking for evidence of asteroids because they figured thats the story of mass extinction, the story bastards. The surprises, they didnt find any big craters. They did my english of asteroid dust at any of the other extinctions. At most of them they found these unimaginable volcanic events, these things called continental flood defaults. When is a unimaginable, these are the biggest whatever which now comprises the huge area of siberia that still is made of soft which at one point was lawful erupted in islam at the inn of the permit, the worst mass extension ever, it wouldve been enough lava to cover the lower 48 states in lava a kilometer deep. So when we talk about the yellowstone being like the most dangers volcano on the planet today, if yellowstone went off it would be bad for agriculture and civilization and it would cover a few states and a few inches of ash. This thing would cover the lower 48 and a kilometer deep of lava. The scary thing, then use thing about this story of volcanoes rather than asteroid is that the way they rendered their destruction isnt through the lobby itself which sounds destructivdistracted but we knon recover in environments like that. How why did it is basically a big pile of lava and discover entries and wildlife and its a nice place. A few thousand years ago, thats what ive heard, i never been. A few thousand years ago canada was covered in ice a mile deep. So life can bounce back from pretty extreme situations. What geologists and paleontologists think how these arcane into the world so many times is huge injections of volcanic gas, the most important one wouldve been Carbon Dioxide. There are ways, really clever geochemist teresa figured out that the huge injections of Carbon Dioxide into the air. We know they got extremely warm at some of these events. One paleontologist described the worst mass extinction ever as, that the oceans around the topics wouldve been the temperature of hot soup. It got pretty extreme. Another thing Carbon Dioxide does is it reacts with seawater and makes it more acidic which makes it harder for a lot of animals to live, things that bell shells or skeletons out of calcium carbonate. We see huge Ocean Acidification at these extensions, huge Global Warming, and ocean starts to lose their auction mostly because of the warming. This should come it sound a little frightening because we are starting to see the first glimmers of this stuff today. It is getting warmer. The oceans have become 30 more acidic since the start of the industrial revolution. Already a rent and arctic the Southern Ocean some kind of plankton that calcify are starting to dissolve the more acidic waters. In the Pacific Northwest oyster growers are having trouble growing or should a more acidic waters. The oceans are losing the oxygen as a as a result of both warming and pollution from industrial agriculture. I think theres a lesson that geology can teach us, which is that so far humans interaction with the environment to the extent that weve negatively influence it has been through direct interference. Weve done a lot of hunting. We have overfished. We have destroyed habitat and theres been a lot of habitat fragmentation, things like that. I think we stopped, the planet would recover pretty quickly. Once you start really messing with the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere things are starting to meddle with these geological forces that of only really been at least in the most extreme events there are associate with the worst things that hav are literally ever hapn in the history of the planet. I think the good news is we are not there yet, which is good. Were certainly not, i mean, so i did into trouble because one of the excerpts published a set were not in a mass extinction yet which both i was trying to be, good news and bad news. Its good news that were not in the end when the fossil record goes almost silent for millions of years. You cant find trees for 10 million years so were not there yet, which is good news i guess. But we are starting to see very faint glimmers of these things. So far i think conservative estimates are in the last few hundred years human beings have wiped out on the order of 1 or less of species that we have documented. The worst mass extinctions upwards of 90 . There still time to get to the worst but a lot of geology and astronomy drive home the point you are kind of like not that big in the big picture. But the next few decades we have the capacity to make decisions about how we live on this planet that really could start to affect the planet for, if youre a geologist, 100 million years ago you could see like we might become important in a geological sense. Before we hit that point, i think we have a lot to learn from these events can even as alien as the planet was, theres still things we can learn from geology. So i guess thats the more of the book and im sorry if that was rambling or two technical or anything, but thanks for being here and a im happy to open up the floor to questions. Do you have any . [applause] i know i rushed through a lot there. Josh. Were any of these extinctions controversial during the time that you were reporting and writing the book . Better understanding of any of them change if he had to do with shifting ground . The mass extinction is famously controversial in that you had these two warring camps, one which vouches for the importance of asteroid, and there was an incredibly big volcanic event in india at the exact same time. So for about 30 years these two camps have been going at it, people of lost professional relationship over these things because they are in volcano camp of asteroid cant. One guy told he wouldnt comment on this extinction because it was too political. But theres a fascinating sort of beginning of reconciliation in that the more time people spend in india dating these volcanoes, the closer it gets, the closer the worst episodes get to the extinction of bounty which is really interesting. Answer even Walter Alvarez of a cigarette the papacy it was an asteroid published a paper last year or the year before saying the asteroid miner disrupted the planet mantle so much that a cause the worst episode of volcanoes and it really was this tagteam effort from asteroids and volcanoes at the same time. Its been cool to watch what was officially acrimonious fight sort of become this coherent story about how just miserable things got at the end of, for dinosaurs and Everything Else that was alive at the time. I had a question that oddly enough you covered a vision of the world and had a question on the same exact point in there. I was curious if there was any comment from the woman who kind of did the research on the after some guy spoke saying that he thinks they could of been related. Has the volcano camp come back and commented on that . So this lady who has been forever kind of out anyone this because she dismisses the asteroid completely. I went to a conference where Walter Alvarez was maybe, afterwards i dont know what they said, but they had this like reunion where it seemed like that a real heart to heart afterwards which is funny to see. She hasnt softened at all. You go to conferences and she dismisses it at hand. Some people call her stubborn but i think shes, she is certainly an interesting lady. Anyone else . I want to pick out a couple pieces of the research of of the really stood on your mind as surprising and memorable. Maybe your entire work. The entire process was memo. I think the most surprising thing to me was that geology really, you think about people going out to the southwest every year for field camp to dig up dinosaurs and things. You think a paleontologist, something that happens after in remote places. But the extent to which these incredible like stories of earths history are all around us. The thing that i live in boston i had no idea. I knew you