ASIAN Geographic Magazine - Issue 1 2010

In this issue

There is so much to be said about the beginning, of time, of life, of us. In such a short space, it would be futile to do so. Thus, I dedicate this issue’s editor’s note to a personal inspiration. I’ll let you guess where it comes from: “From space, it seems an abstraction – a magician’s trick on a darkened stage. And from this distance one might never imagine that it is alive. It first appeared in the sea almost four billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an explosion of life spanning millions of years, nature’s first multicellular organisms began to multiply... and then it stopped. Four hundred and forty million years ago, a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet leaving the vast oceans decimated and empty. Slowly, plants began to evolve, then insects, only to be wiped out in the second great mass extinction upon the Earth. The cycle repeated again and again. Reptiles emerging, independent of the sea only to be killed off. Then dinosaurs, struggling to life along with the first birds, fish, and flowering plants – their decimations, Earth’s fourth and fifth great extinctions. Only 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens appeared – man. From cave paintings to the Bible to Columbus and Apollo 11, we have been a tireless force upon the earth, and off cataloguing the natural world as it unfolds to us. Rising to a world population of over (six) billion people, all descended from that original single cell that first spark of life. But for all our knowledge, what no one can say for certain is what or who ignited that original spark. Is there a plan, a purpose or a reason to our existence? Will we pass, as those before us, into oblivion; into the sixth extinction that scientists warn is already in progress? Or will the mystery be revealed through a sign...