The Silurian Hypothesis

Join the hosts of the 'Last Podcast On The Left'—Marcus Parks, Ben Kissel, and Henry Zebrowski—as they dig deep into the nuts and bolts of historical storytelling with guest Dan Carlin from the acclaimed "Hardcore History" series. This episode peels back the layers on the art and complexity of narrating the past: from the necessity of context for comprehension to the craft of creating enthralling historical narratives with philosophical depth. Carlin shares his intricate process for evaluating the reliability of sources and intertwines this discussion with his personal experiences, including his initial reservations about podcasting and his transformation into a pioneering figure in digital history-telling.

The conversation doesn't shy away from speculative and lighter topics, either. Dan, alongside the show's notable personalities, indulges listeners in 'what-if' scenarios about figures such as Rasputin, interjects humor into the serious business of history, and even ventures into cosmic speculation about extraterrestrial life. In a tribute to Carlin's commitment to his craft, the episode wraps up by guiding listeners on how to delve even deeper into the "Hardcore History" archives, integrating support for sustaining passionate content creation. The pairing of the Last Podcast Network’s irreverent charm and Carlin’s expertise promises a fascinating blend of insight, education, and entertainment.

What’s out there in the vast reaches of space? Are we alone in the universe? Renowned astronomer Carl Sagan offers some insight into these questions and many more in his widely acclaimed book, Cosmos.

Sagan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and perhaps the greatest astronomer of our age. In this book, he provides a comprehensive description of the science, philosophy, and history of astronomical discovery, from ancient Ionia to the time of the book’s publication in 1980.

In this guide, we’ll delve into Sagan’s theories about the possibility of interstellar travel, the search for extraterrestrial life, and man’s quest for understanding the mysteries of the universe. As we go along, we’ll update the information with the most recent scientific discoveries and provide perspectives from other experts in related fields.

Have you always wanted to understand the natural world but found science classes tedious and science textbooks difficult to understand? Author Bill Bryson can relate—that was his motivation for researching and writing A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book is an accessible overview of the natural sciences that describes not only the important discoveries but also the unknowns and controversies that still exist in the sciences, like the mystery of missing mass in the universe and the puzzling details of human evolution.

In this guide, we’ve organized key topics from Bryson’s book into a concise chronology covering the origins of the universe, the geologic history of planet Earth, and the history of life on Earth. We’ll also analyze the scientific issues that Bryson brings up in light of recent scientific papers and compare his perspective to that of scientists like Stephen Hawking.

The human race has left a mark on our planet, sometimes through carelessness and sometimes by design, but how permanent are the changes we’ve made? In The World Without Us, science journalist Alan Weisman asks what would happen if the human race vanished overnight. What effects, positive or negative, would our disappearance have on the world? Weisman’s goal is to address humanity’s environmental impact by imagining a world in which nature is allowed to flourish. In many ways, the world that follows us would be significantly different than what came before.

In this guide, we’ll examine Weisman’s portrayal of humanity’s footprint and what Weisman claims would happen if we suddenly disappeared. Also, we’ll look at other views on climate change, nature’s resilience, and the human race’s impact. We’ll list suggestions for how our species might adapt to a greener world, as well as scenarios that might cause our extinction.

Most features of the human body are just complex versions of those in simpler creatures that, at first glance, seem totally unlike us. As professor and paleontologist Neil Shubin explains in Your Inner Fish, understanding how a shark’s head, a reptile’s brain, and a fish’s fins developed makes sense of complicated and confounding human anatomy. Casting new light on the human family tree, Shubin explains how ancient fossils, embryos, and DNA all provide clues to a story of human development stretching back 3.5 billion years.

What can you learn from 5,000 years of history? Are we in truly novel times, or do we face the same problems that the Romans and Egyptians faced 2,000 years ago?

Will & Ariel Durant, Pulitzer Prize winning historians, are famed for writing The Story of Civilization, a massive 9766-page, 11-volume treatise of the entirety of Western history. They compiled the most important recurring patterns in this book. Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, considers this one of his 3 must-read books.

Learn how human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years, how societies cycle between inequality and redistribution like a heartbeat, and why eventually all civilizations fall.

We might soon officially be living in the Anthropocene Epoch, a period in Earth’s history in which human activity has changed the entire planet. It means we’ve affected the planet as much as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and as much as the repeated Ice Ages.

In The Sixth Extinction, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that by drastically changing the shape of the earth and the composition of the atmosphere, humans have set in motion a sixth mass extinction that may one day be our undoing. The book revisits five previous mass extinction events spanning five hundred million years and compares them to the rapid, widespread extinctions underway today of a range of species including frogs, corals, birds, and rhinos.

These extinctions are a consequence of human-created global warming and ocean acidification, the destruction and fragmentation of forests, and our spread of invasive species around the world. What’s more, these actions will determine the course of life on the planet long after our species is gone.