Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Read Online Free PDF Page A

interplanetary debris. There’s an occasional flash of lightning by which you glimpse a ravaged, pockmarked, not quite spherical world. As it gathers up more and more matter, in units ranging from dust to worldlets, it becomes rounder, less lumpy.
    A collision with a hurtling worldlet produces a shattering explosion, and excavates a great crater. Much of the impactor disintegrates into powder and atoms. There are vast numbers of such collisions. Ice is converted to steam. The planet is blanketed in vapor—which holds in the heat from the impacts. The temperature rises until the Earth’s surface becomes entirely molten, a roiling world-ocean of lava, glowing by its own red heat, and surmounted by a stifling atmosphere of steam. These are the final stages of the great gathering in.
    In this epoch, when the Earth is new, the most spectacular catastrophein the history of our planet occurs: a collision with a sizeable world. It does not quite crack the Earth open, but it does blast a good fraction of it out into nearby space. The resulting ring of orbiting debris shortly falls together to become the Moon.
    The day is only a few hours long. Gravitational tides raised in the Earth’s oceans and interior by the Moon, and in the Moon’s solid body by the Earth, gradually slow the Earth’s rotation and lengthen the day. From the moment of its formation, the Moon has been drifting away from the Earth. Even now, it hovers over us, a baleful reminder that had the colliding world been much bigger, the Earth would have scattered in fragments through the inner solar system—a short-lived, unlucky world like so many others. Then humans would never have come to be. We would be just one more item on the immense list of unrealized possibilities.
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    Shortly after the Earth had formed, its molten interior was churning, great convection currents circulating, a world in a slow boil. Heavy metal was falling to its center, forming a massive molten core. Motions in the liquid iron began to generate a strong magnetic field.
    The time came when the Solar System had pretty well been swept free of gas and dust and rogue worldlets. On Earth, the massive atmosphere—that had kept the heat in—dissipated. Indeed, the collisions themselves helped to drive that atmosphere into space. Convection still carried hot magma up to the surface, but the heat from the molten rock could now be radiated away to space. Slowly the Earth’s surface began to cool. Some of the rock solidified and a thin, at first fragile crust formed, thickened, and hardened. Through blisters and fissures, magma and heat and gases continued to pour out of the interior.
    Punctuated by spasmodic flurries of worlds falling out of the sky, the bombardment slowed. Each large impact produced a great dust cloud. There were so many impacts at first that a pall of fine particles enveloped the planet, prevented sunlight from reaching the surface, and in effect turned off the atmospheric greenhouse effect and froze the Earth. There seems to have been a period, after the magma ocean solidified but before the massive bombardment ended, when the once molten Earth became a frozen, battered planet. Who, scanning thisdesolate world, would have pronounced it fit for life? What wild optimist could have foreseen that peonies and eagles would one day spring from this wasteland?
    The original atmosphere had been ejected into space by the relentless rain of worldlets. Now a secondary atmosphere trickled up from the interior and was retained. As the impacts declined, global dust palls became more rare. From the surface of the Earth the Sun would have seemed to be flickering, as in a time-lapse movie. So there was a time when sunlight first broke through the dust pall, when the Sun, Moon, and stars could first be noticed had there been anyone there to see them. There was a first sunrise and a first nightfall.
    In sunny intervals, the surface warmed. Outgassed water vapor cooled and condensed;