On Saturday, in less than 60 minutes, two academics raced through 4 billion years of Earth’s history, with time left over for questions. It was an enlightening and sobering experience for the 20 or so people present (an audience that included MCFly readers old and new). It happened at Blackwell’s bookshop on Oxford Road [the link lists the other five (free!) events over the coming week] one of the venues for this year’s Manchester Science Festival.

The academics in question, Dr Jan Zalasiewicz and Dr Mark Williams, both at University of Leicester, are co-authors of a book called “The Goldilocks Planet: the four billion year story of Earth’s climate.”

They whipped through it all at a cracking pace. Mark Williams started, and an early analogy was compelling; a hundred years ago the state of geological knowledge was like that of a 13th century person using the “