WHEN YOU SIDER it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult forus to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn』t wait to get going, but then, having gottengoing, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
sider the li. Lis are just about the hardiest visible anisms oh, butamong the least ambitious. They will groily enough in a sunny churchyard, but theyparticularly thrive in enviros where no anism would go—on blowymountaintops and arctic wastes, wherever there is little but rod rain and cold, and almostno petition. In areas of Antarctica where virtually nothing else will grow, you findvast expanses of li—four huypes of them—adheriedly to every wind-whipped rock.
For a long time, people couldn』t uand how they did it. Because lis grew on barerock without evident nourishment or the produ of seeds, many people—educatedpeople—believed they were stones caught in the process of being plants. 「Spontaneously,inanic stone bees living plant!」 rejoiced one observer, a Dr. Homschuch, in 1819.
Closer iion showed that lis were more iing than magical. They are in facta partnership between fungi and algae. The fungi excrete acids that dissolve the surface of therock, freeing minerals that the algae vert into food suffit to sustain both. It is not avery exg arra, but it is a spicuously successful ohe world has more thay thousand species of lis.
Like most things that thrive in harsh enviros, lis are slow-growing. It may take ali more than half a tury to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size ofdinner plates, writes David Attenbh, are therefore 「likely to be hundreds if notthousands of years old.」 It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilliehey simplyexist,」 Attenbh adds, 「testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest leveloccurs, apparently, just for its own sake.」
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are ined to feel that lifemust have a point. lans and aspirations and desires. We want to take stantadvantage of all the intoxig existence we』ve been endowed with. But what』s life to ali? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger.
If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a ro the woods, Ibelieve I would lose the will to go on. Lis don』t. Like virtually all living things, they willsuffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment』s additioence. Life, in short, justwants to be. But—and here』s an iing point—for the most part it doesn』t want to bemuch.
This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If youimagihe 4,500-billion-odd years of Earth』s history pressed into a normal earthly day,then life begins very early, about 4A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celledanisms, but then advano further for the sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 inthe evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but arestless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty mier by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Edia fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg inAustralia. At 9:04P.M. trilobites swim onto the se, followed more or less immediately bythe shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10P.M. plants begin to pop up on theland. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of ba