Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. The evolutionary process would begin again. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again.

If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Earth has survived everything in its time. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away - all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Bacteria first later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival-six hundred years ago.

Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past but to enter it. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Halfway around the world archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survivalsix hundred years ago.

Timeline by michael crichton