Prof. Andy Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. Andy has been a member of the Harvard faculty ever since, serving as both Professor of Biology and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Professor Knoll’s research focuses on the early evolution of life, Earth’s environmental history, and, especially, the interconnections between the two. For the past decade, he has served on the science team for NASA’s MER mission to Mars.

Professor Knoll’s honors include the 2022 Crafoord prize, the Walcott Medal and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science (for his 2003 book Life on a Young Planet), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London.

Topics discussed:

00:00 - Introduction

01:36 - How do scientists know what happened billions of years ago?

05:17 - How scientists figured out the age of the planet

09:30 - 4.6 billion years ago - how stardust created a planet

15:14 - The probability of the earth and life existing

17:57 - Why earth can accommodate life

22:40 - What the earliest life on earth would've been like

29:46 - Photosynthesis and the Oxygen revolution

33:02 - How early life interacted with its environment

38:03 - How the oxygen revolution shaped the atmosphere

41:13 - 'The boring billion years'

44:19 - The Cambrian explosion

49:00 - The development of more advanced animals

51:30 - Andy's most mind-boggling part of the earths history

53:25 - How the major extinction events shaped earth

58:22 - The permian Triassic extinction

59:40 - The evolution of animals to humans

01:01:22 - Is the universe deterministic or stochastic?

01:03:20 - Connect with Andy

01:03:45 - What makes a life worth living?

Buy Andy's book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brief-History-Earth-Billion-Chapters/dp/B08N2QBVYJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3B0ZS1FYJWHV7&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nafWcNEL9ryJVvhwR8S4Onm8O9U7dbPb0BHcF6ReZZX6EIO1rjN4HfY8qN-58Hkq.1ZWBjgI3NyO0h_OH4pqyHS3xIE5XVoYdA1IEm891CRA&dib_tag=se&keywords=andrew+knoll&qid=1721587430&sprefix=andrew+knoll%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1

Read Andy's academic work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=F6mLNzoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

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