“Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.”
![“Most of the reefs [around Christmas Island] are dead, most of the corals are dead, overgrown by algae, and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them.” quote by Enric Sala](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/52e/enric-sala-33009_algae_most-of-the-reefs-around-christmas-islan_581199.jpg)
