Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

Microbes, the stewards of Earth, transformed the planet's chemistry to make it habitable for plants, animals, and humans. Paul Falkowski's book "Life's Engines" explores how these microorganisms made life possible and how human life would cease to exist without them. It explains how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life and issues a warning about the dangers of tinkering with it.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 13 June 2023
Publisher: Princeton University Press

For nearly four billion years, microbes had the primordial oceans all to themselves. These organisms, as the stewards of Earth, transformed the chemistry of our planet to make it habitable for plants, animals, and us.

Life's Engines: A Journey into the Microscopic World explores how these marvelous creatures made life on Earth possible—and how human life today would cease to exist without them.

Paul Falkowski delves into the microscopic world to uncover the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built—and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies.

Falkowski showcases how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.

A vibrantly entertaining book about the microbes that support our very existence, Life's Engines will inspire wonder about these elegantly complex nanomachines that have driven life since its origin. It also issues a timely warning about the dangers of tinkering with that machinery to make it more efficient at meeting the ever-growing demands of humans in the coming century.

Weight: 220g
Dimension: 138 x 216 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691247687