Imagine our galaxy with its immense dark regions, huge turbulent clouds of dust and gas; clumps of matter more than 100 billion kilometres in diameter bathing in less dense regions. Then imagine that the core of one of these clumps collapses, giving rise to a rotating disk of denser dust and gas, the Sun flames up in the centre, rings and grooves form and, after another few million years, planets. Big and small ones, of course, but also a few medium-sized ones. Radioactivity heats up the core, yielding hydrogen, nitrogen, carbonic gas and water vapour, which form the atmosphere.

Over time, the cores cool down, the water condensates and dissolves the carbonic gas. Then carbonated molecules, which have fallen from the sky or formed at the bottom of the oceans, begin to organise themselves and one beautiful morning, life is born! It is still fragile and microscopic, but over a few hundred million years, it diversifies, disperses, evolves and becomes important enough to modify the surface of the planet and transform the atmosphere. Micro-organisms which have grouped together, specialise and eukaryotes evolve, leading to the emergence of multi-cellular organisms. After a few more million years had gone by, the authors of the book ‘From suns to life: a chronological approach to the history of life on earth’ finally got around to telling the story (in only 400 pages), giving the major stages and the innumerable controversies surrounding them.