Most accounts of the origin of life describe a slow accumulation — molecules gathering, complexity creeping upward. This one doesn't. It argues that living things were forced into existence by a disaster, and that the same kind of disaster has been driving biology ever since.
Start with chapter one → It hands you a marble in a dip and a wind you control, and asks you to find something in it before anyone tells you what's there.
Everything alive is running a trade: it takes in energy and spends it on staying complicated — dissipation, in one word. Stop the energy and the complexity falls apart. That trade has been running since before the Earth existed.
So the useful question isn't what were the ingredients. It's how hard was the environment pushing — because that determines what could survive and what couldn't.
There's one number that captures it. Call it chao. It compares how much energy the surroundings deliver against how much it costs to escape whatever rut you're stuck in.
Below one, nothing moves — the world hasn't got enough to give. Above one, things break loose and go looking. The whole story is about what happens at that line.
Which leads somewhere counterintuitive. If you want a system to find something genuinely new, a calm environment is the worst thing for it. You need a shock.
Mass extinctions aren't only destruction. They're the shove that gets a stuck system unstuck — and the first one may have happened before anything was alive at all — between FUCA and LUCA.
None of this is peer reviewed, and it's independent work — one person, not an institution. Every chapter says plainly what's checked, what's someone else's, and what's a guess, and the record has the receipts for all of it. That bookkeeping lives there on purpose, out of the way of the actual story.
Three things set chao: how much energy is arriving, how long the system holds together between disturbances, and how deep the rut is. Move them and see which side of the threshold you end up on.
Sunlight, hydrothermal heat, chemical gradient — whatever the surroundings are pushing in.
How long the system gets to accumulate that energy before something resets it.
How much it would cost to abandon the current arrangement and try another.
Each one below is a chapter: the question that opened it, told the way it was actually worked out — the wrong turns included — ending on whatever it opened next. Follow any one to its end and you'll have found the whole thesis behind it, at whatever depth you wanted to take it to. They're written to be read in order, but nothing stops you starting wherever pulls hardest.
New to this? Chapter 1 has the marble — it's the one built to be played with, not just read. Chapter 4 is the best place to check the argument's actual working if you'd rather see it done live than take it on faith — it's open at every step and runs on data anyone can pull. Every chapter ends with a pointer into the record for whoever wants the receipts once the story's told.
Every chapter above ends on one of these. A stated open question is stronger than an assertion that can't be defended, so none of them get resolved into one here — each has its shape stated, and what would actually close it.
Kari McKern measures how societies accumulate stress and move toward or away from crisis. Same accounting — energy, structure, what persists and what gives way — running on the other half of the timeline. Open data, open code, and the same view that scrutiny is the point rather than the threat.