What was your inspiration for writing Origins?
With all of my books I’ve written the book I
wanted to read but realised didn’t exist yet. It
was something that I was really interested in and
curious about and I wanted to find out. I took
this opportunity to just go off and dig around the
subject, do a whole load of research and reading and
condense that down to a book for other people.
For my last book, The Knowledge, that all came
out of a very simple thought experiment about
what would you do to reboot civilisation after
an apocalypse. The book has nothing to do with
the end of the world; it’s just a way of asking that
question of where stuff comes from in our everyday
life and how can you recover it all if you wanted to.
What I wanted to do with the new book, Origins,
is have an even grander canvas to paint with. Even
more so than the history of science and technology,
but also look into the history of us as a species
and our planet and how those two things have
interacted with each other. So it’s a lot of history, a
lot of science and a lot of space stuff coming into
that as well.The main aspect of the book talks about the
evolution of Earth as much as the evolution of
humans, but is there a way we can learn about
the evolution of the Solar System from all this
as well?
Clearly there are a lot of links from Earth sciences to
planetary sciences. I’m a planetary scientist myself;
I focus on our next-door neighbour planet, Mars,
and a lot of my colleagues who I work with have
come from a geology or Earth science background.
The knowledge of the processes on Earth – such
as volcanism, glaciology or plate tectonics – can be
applied to other planets also, whether that is Venus,
Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter.
What quite often happens is we find something
out about those other planets or moons and apply
that knowledge back to Earth, so it completes a full
cycle of understanding each other. For example,
a lot of research on Venus and the runaway
greenhouse effect that it has suffered has been
helping us inform scientists on Earth about our
own global warming from the carbon dioxide we’re
releasing as a species.Reported by Lee CavendishProfessorLewisDartnelltalksfusinghistorywithscienceand
looking back on how civilisations, the Ice Age and even our
origins have all been undeniably influenced by this ball of rock
and water we call Earth
A GLIMPSE
INTO THE
PLANET THAT
EVOLVED
WITH US
Above:
The cover of
Darnell’s new
book, Origins:
How the Earth
Made UsFar left: The
Milankovitch
cycle brought
Earth into the
Ice Age that
allowed our
species
to roamLewis Dartnell