Life on a Young Planet
25 Jun 2017 23:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
extrapenguinIt's 2004, so probably out of date, but Andrew H. Knoll is good at writing.
Life on a Young Planet is nonfiction about Precambrian life on Earth! It had lots of interesting stuffs about bacteria and other micro-organisms, as well as weird Ediacaran life. The prose was also nice, and it clearly explained a lot of new stuff, like life preferring to use carbon-12, and thus the carbon-12/carbon-13 ratio being a useful measure of life's presence. It also explained shortly some blind alleys of thought, as well as why scientists went there.
All in all, a very intriguing "What" book on an interesting subject, with brief forays into and mentions of "Who", "How", and "Why", to give better texture. It's also given me a few ideas to toy with in origfic.
Additionally,![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
shiftingpath gave what was maybe the best explanation of the appeal of exploration narratives ever in TGE chat. (Repeated small stories of tension and release in small adventures.) I am toying with it in the aforementioned origfic.
Life on a Young Planet is nonfiction about Precambrian life on Earth! It had lots of interesting stuffs about bacteria and other micro-organisms, as well as weird Ediacaran life. The prose was also nice, and it clearly explained a lot of new stuff, like life preferring to use carbon-12, and thus the carbon-12/carbon-13 ratio being a useful measure of life's presence. It also explained shortly some blind alleys of thought, as well as why scientists went there.
All in all, a very intriguing "What" book on an interesting subject, with brief forays into and mentions of "Who", "How", and "Why", to give better texture. It's also given me a few ideas to toy with in origfic.
Additionally,