What is alive, and how did it get here?
Origins, evolution, extinction, and the organisms that live where we expected to find almost nothing.
This region in profile
- Surface
- 2 questions
- Shallows
- 13 questions
- Deep
- 15 questions
- Abyss
- 1 question
- Unknown
- 0 questions
Ways through
Two routes, each starting somewhere different. Nothing here is a prerequisite for anything else, and every question stands on its own. A stop opened from a route carries it: the foot of the question offers the next one.
From nothing to a body
Chemistry to a cell and a cell to a complex one, then sex, how one fertilised cell becomes a body, and why a body ages.
Take this routeCounting what is alive
How many kinds there are, why the counting is hard, and how fast they are going.
Take this route
Inspect the ocean and its routes
Every question here
- What killed the dinosaurs?surface
- Why does anything help anything else?surface
- Are viruses alive?shallows
- Can an extinct species be brought back?shallows
- How many living things have we never met?shallows
- How much of our own ocean have we seen?shallows
- How much of you is you?shallows
- How old is the plague?shallows
- Is this a mass extinction?shallows
- What happened to the Neanderthals?shallows
- What is a species?shallows
- What killed the large animals?shallows
- What lives under the ice?shallows
- Who else was here?shallows
- Why does so much of the ocean glow?shallows
- Do other animals know they exist?deep
- How deep does life go?deep
- How did life begin?deep
- How do animals navigate?deep
- How does a cell know what to become?deep
- Is anyone else out there?deep
- What was the ancestor of everything alive?deep
- Who were we before anyone wrote it down?deep
- Why are there more species in the tropics?deep
- Why did complex cells appear only once?deep
- Why do we age?deep
- Why do we sleep?deep
- Why is there sex?deep
- Why is there so much oxygen?deep
- Would evolution repeat if it ran again?deep
- What lives where sunlight never reaches?abyss