"it showed me a way of looking at the world at a way larger scale than I had previously done, and was very engaging while at it."
It's definitely "sitcom science", especially compared with Guns, Germs, and Steel (I've read both). I found it engaging (check!), and appreciated the earlier chapters that literally start by describing that single-celled organisms + billions of years == some other new form of life (way larger scale? check!)
The comforting nihilistic internal response to that book was "doesn't matter if we nuclear war or death by solar flare, or whatever... a billion trillion years from now, it's intimately necessary that something would go from single-cell organism to multi-cell organism".
It's definitely "sitcom science", especially compared with Guns, Germs, and Steel (I've read both). I found it engaging (check!), and appreciated the earlier chapters that literally start by describing that single-celled organisms + billions of years == some other new form of life (way larger scale? check!)
The comforting nihilistic internal response to that book was "doesn't matter if we nuclear war or death by solar flare, or whatever... a billion trillion years from now, it's intimately necessary that something would go from single-cell organism to multi-cell organism".
Time marches on, even if we do not.