Abstract
Now that we’ve explored some scenarios for life’s emergence and evolution—and seen how tenacious life really is—we can begin to examine the flip side of creation: extinction. Now, it may come as something of a surprise, but this book was initially constructed around the premise that life could be eliminated. Although this may sound a tad brutish, the idea of exploring life through its demise is not new. Most medicine is built upon an examination of what kills us. Through death, we uncover the mechanisms that keep us alive. Thus, through our examination of extinction we come to understand what makes life so tough. This chapter and the one that follows are designed not as a romp through mass destruction but rather as an exploration of what has killed us in the past (this chapter) and what might kill us in the future (Chap. 7). Although these mechanisms are not exhaustive, they do demonstrate how utterly resilient life really is.
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Stevenson, D.S. (2017). Extinction. In: The Nature of Life and Its Potential to Survive. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52911-0_6
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